In class Mitchell says his scholarship generally explores political theology in the West. By this he does not mean the liberationstyle theology of the past generation, feminist, third-word, etc. that passes in "progressive" seminaries. Rather Mitchell connects classic themes of political theory and theology, for example, by showing the influence of St. Augustine's errancy of the soul concept on Tocqueville's democracy. Mitchell's extensive same-page footnotes often draw connections between philosophic writing and Biblical principles (with chapter and verse!).

For Rene Girard's readers, this exploration of mimesis in political theory is familiar if in a distinct key. My explicit Girardian reflections appear after the review below.

Once again Professor Mitchell elucidates a central text of political theory, the caverns of the human soul, and, indeed, the trajectories of Western civilization. One cannot, however, assess the merits of this claim about PLATO'S FABLE (or previous Mitchell books) on an initial glance in the table of contents or a cursory reading. One must engage patiently with the text.

PLATO'S FABLE begins with an overview of contemporary political theory and one of its main misunderstandings -- an analysis of mimesis (that is, imitation) in human life. Reason, as understood by Habermas or Rawls, doesn't value the existence of mimesis and is blind to parts of the soul, such as honor, that are excluded from what Mitchell calls "The Fable of Liberalism." Identity politics and methodological individualism, identified as derivatives of Hegel, Rousseau and Luther, are also shown to lack a proper, balanced concept for imitation of earthly and divine patterns.

A full account of reason and the ability to think beyond these narrow Reformation categories of human association may come through a return to Plato, Mitchell sugests. The close reading of THE REPUBLIC which follows the lively introduction is not ordered simply from start to finish. Rather, Mitchell deftly and patiently summarizes Plato's strategies -- analogy, allegory, narrative -- to speak about the elements of the soul which Plato explores. Mitchell connects the central theme of THE REPUBLIC, the search for justice in the ideal city, to the ordering of the soul. Seekers of "justice" are lead astray by following various "mortal patterns" expressed by Plato's conversation partners. After examining Plato's interaction with Thrasymachus ("might = right"), Polemarchus and Cephalus (father and son focused on wealth), Adeimantus, and Glaucon, we begin to recognize the role of both imitation and the refusal to imitate, the predictable reasons for aping and ways new generations re-pattern, the soul in fever seeking pleasure and an enclosed soul seeking honor.

By the end of Chapter 2 one can identify the three types of souls central to Plato's text (honor-loving, wealth-seeking, and pleasure-seeking), relate the historical and personal evolution of these types, and apply these soul-types to diverse problems of public life such as democracy-building in non-Western environs, the popularity of genealogy and the search for "roots", the degeneration of "rights-talk" into monologues about preferences and the cost explosion of end-of-life medical treatment. Particularly clever and meaningful is Mitchell's talk of the "true prisoner's dilemma" to address the mortal condition. Here Plato's analogy of the cave and contemporary game-theory or "rational-choice economics" are playfully contrasted. In this comparison, the reader is struck by the numbingly narrow terms of contemporary political science and appreciates the recovery of conceptual tools that this book offers.

As Plato's discussants often leave unconvinced or still believing themselves correct, so, too, readers may leave unaware of essential the teaching of Mitchell and Plato. This is a shame, for at the heart of both texts rests a beautiful suggestion that readers are encouraged to glimpse and admire. Pursuit of philosophy, or the practice of "death properly understood", harmonizes the divisions of the confused soul and brings together things human and divine. The frenetic nature of the soul in a democracy, and here Mitchell recalls his earlier work on Tocqueville, serves as an essential step in the soul's journey, leading first to exhaustion. This exhaustion ultimately opens the possibility of receiving the gift of knowledge of The Good.

Returning to the role of imitation and the limits of reason, knowledge of The Good is considered a Divine Pattern that frees the soul from various defective mortal patterns. This central teaching -- that knowledge of The Good liberates by offering a Divine model and strengthens souls for the return into the cave -- cannot be proven, only verified by experience. To live justly, one cannot imitate teachers or role models. It is in this shadowy cave, elucidated by Mitchell, that we dwell.

This final line shows a difference between philosophy, properly focused on "death rightly understood", and what I understand to be the position of Gil Baile and Athos, for whom the existence of the Catholic Church serves an exemplary positive mimetic force through the ages. I am continuing to appreciate the depth and beauty of this teaching. The Church, through the Eucharist sacrament, brings the participant into the experience of the final sacrifice, God's own. The other sacraments are further reminders of human fidelity to the covenantal relationship. Saints stand as positive human models, as do, hopefully, the clergy.

My own sensibilities tend to value the experience of being relatively unmoored, a small vessel in the stormy ocean of liberal society. It is part of my own journey, true. Elements of Plato noted above (the soul in fever) and Tocqueville (perhaps via St. Augustine's autobiographical theology) suggest a truer freedom awaits the restless soul those who turn for salvation from the one place that remains unconsumed, the flame of the Divine.

I have considered the era of liberal modernity to successfully harness our drive to idolatry and mimetic violence. In pop culture, passion flows to the fads of the day, only to change directions.  The Cathars and other Gnostics threatened the faithful with heresy and a total takeover of the Church.  Fans of Zach Efron will grow up and turn to Johnny Depp, and the threat to sacred institutions is quite minimal.  Meanwhile, I appreciate the dangerous "catechism" (immersed teaching) which the young in liberal society face, with the increasing options of sexual and gender fluidity appearing and rabid anti-Western self-loathing.  How many must drown in these storms in flimsy vessels before addiction and mental disorder destroy from within or forms of fascism, progressive or otherwise, direct the unmoored souls to outward violence.  I remain troubled.

This belief is why I write a blog. It’s why I write fiction and erotica, too. It’s why I draw – another form of conversing. Which brings up the point that there are many forms of conversing. Which brings me to the title of this post.

Crimson and Clover Over and Over

My own life has taught me the most honest conversation comes from the body. Many people will disagree with that statement on the face of it, but consider how easy it is to lie with words and hard to lie with your body. Have you ever been with someone who said they weren’t shy, but at a party, you knew they were? Have you ever slept with someone who said they loved you, but in bed, you knew they didn’t?

Things like lie detectors rely on the fact that it’s much harder to make your skin lie than your mouth. Those adept at reading body language discern the truth from lies for this very reason, and do you realize how many different interest groups are seeking better understanding of body language, even a science of it? From police and psychologists to fiction writers. Don't I love the author who can get across this sort of complexity.

Sure, the body can be overcome. Not altered but managed, which seems to be the essence of a great deal of religious morality, from Christians to Buddhists. Overcoming the body? I’ve never been clear on the rationale: you mean, avoiding pain by avoiding pleasure? What's the point?

Nevertheless, the ability to overcome the body has become so identified as the mark of spiritual athletes that religions believe the failure to achieve it, and certainly a lack of interest in achieving it, is virtually a modern disease.

Where You Begin is Where You End

But it seems to me, if you pursue the goal of overcoming your body, you’re pursuing self-creation rather than self-discovery. Isn’t that more like hubris than humility? I mean, it challenges Creation as somehow deficient, as potentially made better by you.

I know, you want to mention something here. I can see your shoulders tightening, see you leaning forward, your eyebrows flexing with thought. I'm pretty good at reading body language. Wait, you say, what about the Fall? Isn't trying to overcome yourself only about a return to the real creation, God’s Creation, since we made such a bad show of it the first time?

Don't know, but I'm beginning to doubt it because, true or not, that myth had to be made, you see. If we each looked to our own bodies for what seemed most true and valuable and desirable, we’d risk anarchy. We’d risk conflict on a Girardian scale (see my posts on Rene Girard for more), where everyone’s fighting for his right to party. That leaves culture bereft of the self-sacrificers it needs for unity.

Culture is built on religion and religion is built on self-sacrifice. Some few or many must accept the limitations others don’t. Those who don’t sacrifice offer palatable reasons to the self-sacrificers, whatever works given the religion’s mindset: you’re heroic, you’ll be rewarded later, you’ll avoid pain, you’re evil and have all you deserve.

If you think this sounds a little Nietzschean, well yeah, a little. I’ve always liked his questions. His answers leave a lot to be desired.

The Sound of Silence

These thoughts came to me recently as I wrestled with the Catholic Church’s many imposed silences.

For example, you won’t see Catholic leaders discussing women’s ordination anymore. Pope John Paul II silenced debate on that. He didn’t just disagree and say his decision was final and let the chatter go on. He told Catholics the world over they must not mention it again on pain of discipline. Did the same with certain voices calling for sacramental inclusion of committed gays and lesbians. No Jesits for the sodomites.

And there are other silences occurring in my life -- with family members, with fellow bloggers who don’t like my words, with friends who expect more compromise from me.

I'm guilty of many things, but I've never been guilty of silence. I've poked a few bears and hope you will, too. I hope you'll go make some noise. 

Maar de elite onder de goede-zaakstrijders zijn natuurlijk die met een eigen jaar. Zo was 2004 het Internationaal Rijstjaar, 2005 het Jaar van het Microkrediet, en 2008 het Jaar van de Aardappel, van de Planeet Aarde, van de Talen en van het Sanitair (dat laatste helaas geen kleuterschoolgrap voor een groot deel van de wereldbevolking).

Wat ik vorig jaar helemaal gemist heb: 2007 was het Internationaal Jaar van het Polytheïsme - een project van deze jongens die van mening zijn dat het polytheïsme een belangrijke bijdrage kan leveren aan de wereldvrede:

The "International Year Of Polytheism” wants to overcome the epoch of the monotheistic worldviews (and its derivatives such as "The West" and "The Arab World") through the reconstruction of a polytheistic multiplicity in which countless gods and goddesses will eventually neutralize each other. Polytheism is democracy, Monotheism a dictatorship, even in its pseudo-secular form.
Freed from the servitude of monotheism and the fraternal strife of the trinity, the world would be redeemed in a chaotic baptism of multiplicity. Besides, we believe that polytheism is the most suitable form of religion for a modern, dynamic and cosmopolitan young culture. Improve your C.V. with polytheism. Create your own heavens and hells. Or try it out yourself with our special Gods/Goddesses trial subscription.

Boeiend zijn ook deze unieke beelden van een monotheïstische ghostbuster die ectoplasma verwijdert in een kerk:

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.525736&w=425&h=350&fv=]

En speciaal voor P (en een beetje voor mezelf) is er een link naar een interview met René Girard, die overigens bestrijdt dat monotheïsme per se moet leiden tot geweld.

Zo. En nu ga ik gauw een kaki-vrucht eten ter ere van Zeus.

I've scanned the Max Weber references in Girard's works and the secondary literature but haven't seen this tight connection between the ideal types and mimetic theory.

Weber's "Ideal Types" of societies:

• Charismatic
• Traditional
• Rational/Bureaucratic

Weber's charismatic addresses the first stage of Girard's Mimetic Theory.

Mimetic Theory posits as the major force in human affairs a competition between members for the objects of another's desire, an original state of nature like Hobbes'. A charismatic leader derives authority by channeling the anxiety this competition creates through an appeal to violent scapegoating.

Traditional society uses the peace established by the charismatic by ritual and myth -- the original violence becomes sacred. While the power of the myths and rituals endures, social order is maintained. However, as the gravity of the violence weakens, a new round of bloodletting of either a greater number or more prestigious victims is needed.

Rational society has emerged in limited circumstances. Weber, at the end of vast historical and cultural study, suggests that certain traits of Protestantism, specifically Calvinism, led to the habits necessary for the rise of modern capitalism. Yet as the animating kernels shed their husks, modern man is left with an entirely disenchanted world, his "iron cage." Girard, too, speaks of the effect of the Gospels to dispel the Primitive Sacred's previous ability to maintain social cohesion against the anxiety of "mimetic rivalry."

The disenchantment fable of liberalism leaves us rather unprepared to comprehend and confront the violence done in the name of the Primitive Sacred in our own day. More on the resources the Biblical tradition offers to the global war on terror later, and check out Chronicles of Atlantis for regular updates.

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The Seduction of Entitlement

Self-pity is not only something that can be used to manipulate you, like in the style of Rev. Jeremiah Wright; buying into it can also just plain get in your way. It makes choices for you and prevents others. It steals your freedom. That's because the engine that drives self-pity is a lack of humility, a sense of entitlement, the power of rivalry.

When you feel you deserve something -- like the freedom to defy convention or the ability to influence people or an expensive gadget or a particular status -- you're letting rivalry take the wheel, and as Rene Girard has shown, that causes wrecks.

I was thinking about all this today, not because of Rev. Wright's hate speech (a good example nonetheless), but because of the murder-suicide of an Iowa City man, Steven Sueppel. Indicted for embezzlement and money-laundering, Sueppel murdered his wife and four children and then killed himself. How much a sense of entitlement, pride, and self-pity this man must have been carrying around!

The Myth of Redemptive Violence

Like many perpetrators of murder-suicides, Sueppel claimed in notes that he murdered his four children and wife to save them from the pain of his shame. Funny, he didn't think to save his brother and father from the shame, just a woman and children. Then he called 911 to inform the police and left messages for other family framing his violence in terms of heroic compassion. In other words, his last act on earth was one final defiant claim to his own self-importance.

Was he truly deluded, or did he maybe kill his wife because she asked for a divorce, and then killed the kids to support his claim to compassion? Whether he bought into it himself or just used the excuse, redemptive violence is a powerful myth in our culture.

As Jesus showed us, violence redeems nothing. Er...at least that's what Jesus meant if you take Girard's interpretation. I'm afraid if you read the Catholic version, you may find yourself mired in hypocrisy, since, through Jesus's death, violence redeemed us. Hmm. If the Atonement has made all the sense to you that it used to for me, you might want to read a little Girard.

A Story of Pure Evil

My five-year-old daughter heard some conversation and wanted to know about it. I usually have to take a moment to convert adult nuances into a child's black-and-white understanding, but not this time. I think pure evil has touched me today, and I didn't even know the man.

Of course, I can't imagine the life-altering aspects of the Sueppel family's grandparents, family, neighbors, the children's classmates, workmates, and fellow parishioners. The final irony -- at least to me -- is that he'll be buried in a Catholic ceremony this Saturday along with the family he murdered and laid to rest in consecrated ground at St. Joseph's Cemetery.

I keep reminding myself that we're all sinners. I keep reminding myself that rivalry begins in little identity games of how I'm better than you (because, for example, I go to church every Sunday or drive an S.U.V.), but it's that same kind of thinking that can end in this kind of horror.

Le premier ministre, Jean Charest, se montre ouvert au péage, mais selon une approche de cas par cas, et non pas comme une solution globale.  Selon cet autre article, la ville de Montréal, qui envisage établir un péage aux 15 ponts donnant accès à l'île, tient à ce que les revenus de ces péages aillent exclusivement au financement du transport en commun, selon le porte-parole du cabinet du maire, Maxime Chagnon.  De son côté, André Girard, porte-parole de la Société des ponts fédéraux, qui gère les ponts Jacques-Cartier, Champlain et Honoré-Mercier, en plus de l'autoroute Bonaventure et du tunnel de Melocheville, dit que si Montréal recueille un péage aux ponts gérés par l'organisme fédéral, celui-ci verra certainement son enveloppe budgétaire, consacrée à l'entretien des infrastructures, réduite.  "C'est un peu naïf de penser le contraire", a-t-il précisé.  Si l'on trouve, à l'ADQ, que l'établissement du péage aux ponts de Montréal serait prématuré, parce que l'offre actuelle de transport en commun est inadéquate, le PQ prétend pour sa part, à l'instar de la ville, qu'une bonne partie des revenus devrait aller au développement de l'offre en transport en commun.

Personnellement, je serais en faveur de confier l'entretien du réseau autoroutier à l'entreprise privée, par l'entremise d'appels d'offres, les entreprises responsables de l'entretien pouvant se financer par les péages perçus sur la route - ou le pont - à entretenir.  Cela ne nécessiterait qu'un simple projet de loi pour empêcher les monopoles, et éviterait à coup sûr que le gouvernement fasse autre chose des sommes recueillies que ce à quoi elles devraient servir, soit l'entretien du réseau routier supérieur.  C'est là où je fais le moins confiance au gouvernement, de quelque parti soit-il.  De tous temps, les sommes recueillies pour des causes précises ont été littéralement volées pour être mises au fonds consolidé du gouvernement.  Que l'on se souvienne des libéraux de Robert Bourassa, qui effectuait des ponctions régulières dans les surplus de la SAAQ, comportement suivi par le parti québécois une fois au pouvoir.

À mes yeux, il est hors de question que les sommes recueillies par le moyen de péages routiers servent à autre chose qu'à l'entretien des routes où lesdites sommes sont recueillies, et particulièrement au transport en commun.  Celui-ci est déjà fortement subventionné par les automobilistes, par l'entremise de taxes spéciales, perçues sur l'immatriculation des véhicules de promenade, et sur l'essence, alors pas question d'en ajouter encore.  Les automobilistes paient déjà trop, compte tenu de ce qu'ils reçoivent, et il serait grandement temps que le principe de l'utilisateur-payeur s'applique aussi aux utilisateurs du transport en commun.  Ceux-ci se rendraient compte du coût réel du service qu'ils exigent.

Jag vet inte varför jag börjar blogga nu. Jag har inga klart definierade riktlinjer för innehållet och inget egentligt mål. Exhibitionism? Kanske. Jag vet inte.

Den första text jag presenterar skrev jag i morse efter att ha påbörjat en läsning av René Girards Syndabocken. 

På kvällen den första januari frågar jag mig i min dagbok, efter en dag i utdragna plågor; med hjärnan och magen badandes i en frätande blandning av nikotin, whisky och modafinil:

Varför tror jag, varje år, att nyårsafton vore något speciellt? Som om luften vore laddad med magi, en trollformel som sluter sig runt världen för att rena den från synd!

En härd av aggressivitet och syndiga begär är vi, flytandes runt under jordskorpan som en lavaström. I mötet med de andra, modellerna av vad vi skulle kunna vara, bildas det explosiva ämne som i kalendertrogna eruptioner får vårt våld att stiga upp till ytan. Genom tarmarnas vindlingar tränger det sig upp och sprutar ut, under öronbedövande dån och färgsprakande prakt, ur jordens rövhål. Att blanda in skit i detta är inte godtyckligt, och inte endast ett uttryck för barnsliga chockeffekter för precis som skiten är en del av oss som vi inte vill kännas vid, är vårt hat, vår svartsjuka och avund ’fekalier som ligger och jäser i djupet av våra fördömda delar: och som en dålig mage, som drar ihop sig i kramper är de upphovet till vår smärta.

Våldet tecknas alltid i kontrastrika kulörer: fyrverkerierna som öppnar sig som blödande variga sår mot himlens svarta hud; hat, svartsjuka, förakt och självförakt är det egentliga ämne som skänkerna raketerna dess prakt. Men det är också ett ämne i oss, en människans slaggprodukt (precis som i naturen är slagget det som brinner häftigast), men vi försöker att inte låtsas om den: ingen vill gräva i sin egen skit. Som en slags amputation skär vi bort, under så sterila former som möjligt (den glänsande vita porslinsskålen), det förhatliga från vår kropp. Vi vill kopplas fria från vår synd.

Nyårslöftet är det offentliggjorda självföraktet. Här tar vi vänner och familj med oss in på toaletten och låter dem, med besvärade miner, iaktta vår självstympning. Men som ett tecken på vår upphöjdhet målar vi skiten i de gladaste färger och låter den förgås i flammorna som tecknar sig mot himlen.

Denna fåfänga dröm, där synden dör om natten och där vi en gång får vakna, fri från skuld, i morgonljusets smekningar över vår renade återuppståndna kropp, är dömd att misslyckas. I stället för en smekning blir solen, och med den livet, till en brännande plåga mot våra svullna ögonlock. Och istället för att skiljas från vår skuld när vi i sänder den skrikandes upp mot himlavalvet kommer den störtandes tillbaka, rakt ner mot källan. Och i bakfyllan finner den en jordmån där den kan växa med en aldrig förut skådad kraft. 

Let me begin by speaking with, or at least about, Cheryl. First: Cheryl, THANK YOU for introducing us to Girard. Very few times have I been so rewarded for pursuing another's advice on whose books to read. That said, I'll confess that I think you gave me the wrong impression in the beginning: I expected Girard to be saying something quite different from what, in the end, I'm convinced he's saying. I'm not sure whether that wrong impression stems from a simple lack of comprehension on my part, a kind of complexity of communication that put some kind of a gap between us, or (if I won't offend by suggesting it) a misunderstanding of Girard on your own part. What I'll be doing, in part, then, in the following is asking you to let me know if we are reading Girard the same way. That is, when you read my summary of Girard's approach to textuality below, could you provide some thoughts about whether you think Girard is saying what I think he's saying, etc.? I'd much appreciate that.

Now, let me introduce my thoughts on Girard with a bit of narrative. I began reading The Scapegoat at about the same time I began reading John Brooke's The Refiner's Fire. Of the two, I'll confess that I was far more interested in Brooke's book. That is, I was far more sympathetic, by nature, to the ideas I imagined would be presented in The Refiner's Fire, mostly because I have had something of an abiding interest in the hermetic, and because I anticipated him outlining how the hermetic subculture of radical protestant belief opened the way for Mormonism's remarkable success. On the other hand, I was almost hostile (as those participating early in the discussion will well remember!) to Girard from the beginning: I was, from the very start, made quite nervous by his explicit decision to do violence to texts, to transgress texts in the name of some kind of (essentially liberal) ethics. Thus I came to these projects with radically different expectations.

Because my little family moved from Washington to Oregon last August, both projects were disrupted for me, and both books sat on the shelf for a few months. I returned to The Scapegoat first, primarily because I had this blog hanging over my head. I only came back, in fact, to The Refiner's Fire a month or so ago. Interestingly, as I've worked through both of these in greater detail and with more consistent attention over the past month or two, my expectations were frustrated on both accounts: whereas I expected Girard to work out a theory of transgressing scriptural texts, he turned out in the end to do precisely the opposite; and whereas I expected Brooke to lay out the possibility of thinking carefully about a "prepared people," he rather filled three hundred pages with remarkably ignorant research and Brodie-like sensationalistic possibilities without ground. I finished reading both books yesterday, and my wife can tell you the difference in my final reactions: my frustration with Brooke made me swear off the New Mormon history for a few months, while my fascination with Girard was the subject of an hour and a half discussion while the kids played at the park.

Now, I bother to tell the above story for two reasons. First, I want to deter anyone and everyone from wasting their time with Brooke's book. :) Second, I really, really want to highlight how much Girard has overturned my expectations! Girard's work here is remarkably promising. So... on to the actual work of summary!

Girard is essentially a literary critic, but of a radical nature... if not of a radically Lacanian nature. (I wondered--and doubted--all through reading this book that he had been influenced by Lacan, but he makes it as clear as can be that he was on page 196.) There are, in both Girard's and Lacan's language (and this is something I pointed out in my very first post on Girard!) a threefold structure underlying the theory: the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. While the first of these three "categories" has reference to actual human interaction, the other two have reference to kinds of writing. That is, there are imaginary texts and symbolic texts. (Imaginary, here, does not at all mean something like "non-existent," but something like "of or pertaining to images.") Each of these kinds of texts is an inscription of the Real or of reality, but they differ precisely in the way they inscribe reality. For Girard, the imaginary text inscribes reality in a persecutory way, while the symbolic text inscribes reality in a revelatory way.

The difficulty is that these two kinds of texts are both... texts. That is, they are both written, often with the same words, etc. And hence they are too easily confused. In fact, it is the way one sees the relationship between these two kinds of texts that defines one's place in the grand scheme of things: if one confuses the two kinds of texts, one remains, essentially, in sin (a persecutor); if one distinguishes between the two kinds of texts and adheres faithfully to the work of the symbolic text, one receives, essentially, grace (and becomes a witness/martyr). The first of these two ways of understanding texts--the one that does not distinguish the imaginary from the symbolic--is what Lacan calls neurosis: the neurotic (I'll say: natural, psychical, man) cannot see what is actually at work in the texts. The second of these two ways of understanding texts--the one that distinguishes the imaginary from the symbolic--is that of the person beyond neurosis, what I will agree with Girard in calling the person under the influence of the Spirit, the person who interprets (and preaches!) texts by the power of the Spirit.

How nicely this matches up with psychoanalysis is astounding. The neurotic/natural/psychical reader is little more than an automaton, determined by the political necessities of the scapegoat mechanism, thus entirely ruled over by the will of--Girard does not hesitate to say it--Satan. The spiritual reader has all freedom in reading, all freedom in acting because she can be true to the text as it actually is: she binds herself only to Christ's revelation through the Spirit. Note, then, that the neurotic reader is essentially unconscious of the symbolic text, that is, of the scriptures ("Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do"), and one must come under the sway of the text and the Spirit in order to be distracted from his neurosis.

Lining the scriptures up with the unconscious is of some importance, it seems to me, because, as Ricoeur constantly points out in his work on Freud, the unconscious is timeless, while history, culture, time, politics, and the like, are all a function of consciousness. Indeed, as Ricoeur makes clear, psychoanalysis forces one to understand history itself to be a kind of sorting out the forces of o/re-pression. This point has a nice echo in Girard: there is no history, so to speak, in scripture, only in imaginary texts. Really, it is the burden of the first half of the book to work out this history of texts: the downplaying of real violence in textual evolution is the very fabric of history and time. History is thus the slow becoming conscious of the unconscious texts of scripture. This theory of history--which Girard sums up under the title "History and the Paraclete"--deserves further attention.

What all of this amounts to, then, is a kind of theory of texts that divides writings up into the books of the dead and the book of life: imaginary texts are filled with magic and superstition, are false writings of wizards that peep and mutter, of incantations seeking after the sacralized dead, while symbolic texts are filled with the promise of life, are given to the law and to the testimony/martyrdom, are sealed up in their parabolic structure.

This seems to me to be the most promising Continental project of all (though of course it spills over into everyone else I'm reading and studying): to think about two kinds of text and how the radically faithful are interpreting them, in such a way as to reveal all the hidden works of darkness, to call all to repentance.

Now, let me get on the table my only hesitance with Girard (though I at first believed he was going to call for a transgression of scriptural texts, he does not): his constantly putting this revelatory preaching of the symbolic/scriptural texts in terms of ethics. How can he not see that ethics are always imaginary rather than symbolic? And yet, it is perhaps Girard himself who provides the key to sorting out this difficulty: there is a vestige, even in this powerful revealer of the scapegoat mechanism, of mimeticism in his mentioning ethics. Ethics, of course, always ties back to political discourse, to mimeticism, etc., though Girard seems to miss this point. The radical fidelity to the symbolic/scriptural text for which Girard calls likewise calls one beyond ethics, unless we are radically to change the meaning of ethics (something well worth doing! cf. Badiou's Ethics). But if it is possible to transgress this point in Girard in the very name of Girard, can I say I really have any hesitance about his project?

A marvelous project. What else by him should I read?

Both violence and non-violence accept the rationale of willing sacrifice as the means for a group to self-identify. This is something that needs emphasis for all who seek identity as pacifists, feminists, atheists, or any other liberal-leaning ideology, and I'm one of those. The twentieth century brought gains to disenfranchised classes of society, but the structure we work within has not really changed, has it? So how far can our gains really go?

We can talk about blood sacrifice in terms of sectarian religion, as Girard does most often, or civil religion (nationalism), as the authors do here. Either way, escalating violence can be stopped only when a sacrifice is made. The most important point here is that sacrifice works to stop violence NOT when we have killed, say, ten-thousand enemies, but when ten-thousand of our own group members have given their lives.

What bonds a group is the willing sacrifice of its members, not the unwilling sacrifice made of an enemy. In other words, a member of my group who gives her life (ultimate sacrifice) for my group reinforces to me (as a member of the group) the truth of my world-view. It’s not the “sacrifice” she makes of other people that matters but of herself. And the authors elaborate this point:

To understand how war is ritual sacrifice, recall that the raw material of society is bodies. Organizing and disposing of them is the fundamental task of all societies. The social is quite literally constructed from the body and from specific bodies that are dedicated and used up for the purpose. The enduringness of any group depends at least partly on the willingness of its members to sacrifice themselves for the continuing life of the group. The creation of national or sectarian religious sentiment depends on a common secret, which is that the underlying cost of all society is the violent death of some portion of its members. There is more. Our deepest secret, the collective group taboo, is the knowledge that society depends on the death of this sacrificial group at the hands of the group itself. This is the totem principle concretized.

Why is it necessary to kill our own, and why can't we admit it? It is necessary, and we cannot admit it because violence poses the greatest threat to the group from within as well as without. It is never eradicated. Like sex, it can only be channeled. When violence begins, it can be prevented from spreading only if someone is willing to submit. Submission is the sacrificial principle. To keep violence from escalating and killing every member of the group, either by invasion from without or contagion within, group members agree to submit to a violent authority who punishes all who do not honor the totem's exclusive right to kill its own. Even when the enemy kills us, his transgression is not so much that he kills as that he kills us. Only totem authority--the group deity in sectarian terms, the group itself in Durkheimian terms--is so entitled.

For example, we tell ourselves that the purpose of war is to kill the enemy. And it is. But what keeps the group together and makes us feel unified is not the sacrifice of the enemy but the sacrifice of our own. If the ritual purpose of war were merely to kill the enemy, the deaths of some 40,000 or more Iraqis would have made a lasting contribution to American national unity. During the Persian Gulf war, notable for the ephemerality of its unifying effect, only 147 Americans died, a poor totem sacrifice. The two most unifying bloodlettings in American history, the Civil War and World War II, sacrificed the largest number of the nation's own, both absolutely and in proportion to the total population. We construct our identity from the bodies of group members. All enduring groups, national or otherwise, rely on just such a sacrificial identity.

The social logic of willing self-sacrifice leaves violence and non-violence indistinguishable, two faces of the cultural coin. But Girard warned if we lose this sacrificial system, we lose societal cohesion and all-against-all violence results. In response to this, conservative Girardians like Gil Bailie, who continue down an orthodox road, believe the sacred has been hijacked by a “deviated transcendence” that will lead to nihilistic violence. He criticizes modern secularism as something that has, as Tracy Rowland says, “ruined and actually denied…the very things it apparently celebrated: embodied life, self-expression, sexuality, aesthetic experience and human political community.”

Bailie denies that mimetic theory expresses “a quintessentially modern liberal point of view: anti-sacrificial, critical of the cultic, favoring the 'prophetic' over the 'priestly'…” (Getting the Anthropology Right ) He seems to be taking liberals at our word, helping us to hide our sacred and perpetuate our myths. Liberal Girardians -- many pacifist -- are firmly embedded in the sacrificial system, only they make sacrifices of themselves and don't designate others in their group for sacrifice as traditional religion does. Liberals haven’t lost the sacred or the priestly. (We just don’t trust the men-in-black who, as recently as December, told us they were God's accountants and had been informed -- by email? -- that their boss would wipe out our tab in Purgatory if we made a trip across the world to Lourdes.)

When you move from sectarian systems like the Catholic Church to analyzing the myths embedded and hiding in economic systems or national identity, you can't possibly think the sacred is anywhere but where it’s always been – ennobling the deaths of expendable members of society, whether in liberal nonviolent resistance for Jesus or in conservative pre-emptive war for Freedom. Nationalism (a modern civil religion) as one example of deviated transcendence, has the same structure and virtually identical contingencies as the "true" transcendence offered by conventional religion.

Our era has not witnessed an escalation of violence. This seems to be a fundamental error of the conservative mind-set, one driven by fear of change, a claim that the sky is falling. The results of violence are merely distributed (a little) more fairly and its results are not as euphemized as they were, say, fifty or a thousand years ago. So we see now what was hidden before, and we've traded a great deal of oppression for other species of violence (oppression is violence), but it’s probably a zero sum game. Our trust in “holy” violence and sacred symbols is strong as ever.  

"Cohesion in enduring groups is accomplished within a framework of violence as a structural rather than contingent social force, religion as the truth that we are willing to die for, and the re-presentation of society to itself through blood sacrifice rituals performed on the bodies of supplicants.”

Be sure to read Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion  for yourselves if you want to understand the extensive argument and details given that shed light on violence from more angles than just civil religion.

I don't know exactly what passage it was in this chapter that suddenly revealed this to me, but I was struck somewhere along the way by the idea of reading a parallel (or equation) between Girard's mimesis and D&C 121:35: "And why are they not chosen? Because their hearts are set so much upon the things of this world, and aspire to the honors of men, that they do not learn this one lesson..." (notice that I'm limiting my quotation of the passage just to this heart-set/aspiration business for now). Regardless of what that one lesson is, what we're being told here is that it is mimesis that keeps us from learning it, and I'm beginning to see how Girard can be taken as outlining the structure of the obstruction for us... in remarkable detail.

But there is a great deal more to this insight than at first appears. I've been almost constantly annoyed (as I've expressed again and again) by Girard's rather cavalier treatment of Freud throughout the book: he insists on reducing Freud to a strawman fairly regularly. But my ongoing reading in Badiou's work has given me, quite recently, another way to understand this constant reduction of Freud: Badiou gives psychoanalysis a kind of task within a broader (intellectual) division of labor, namely, the task of sorting out the meaning of (the genuine event of) love (eros), which is only one task among several others. This gives me an interesting way of reading Girard: he constantly ridicules Freud because he thinks there can be nothing but the task he sees before himself. He's... paranoid... I suppose. That is, he's not sure he can countenance any other kind of thinking than the one he is undertaking, and so he has got to throw out Freud with the assertion of his own project.

But the difficulty is this: Girard has a great deal in common with Lacan, not only terminologically, but thematically (right down to his concept of mimesis!). That is, Girard seems to me to be fundamentally Freudian. So...

What I'm seeing and not at all explaining well here is this: Girard might be taken as providing a careful analysis of just "half of things," the other half being more explicitly the work of Freud, and Girard's constant slandering of Freud is a consequence of a kind of jealousy/zeal (Girard wants to be able to command the whole project).

But let me put this all more clearly. I think there are two "halves" of a broader project here, though it is perhaps better to speak of a horizontality and a verticality that cross each other. Girard is explicating the horizontal: mimesis as (sibling) rivalry, etc. Freud, however, is explicating the vertical: the father/son relationship (if we stick most immediately with Freud, it unfortuantely remains patriarchal). It seems to me that Lacan has got both of these projects intertwined in his remarkable project, perhaps especially because he takes this all to the linguistic level.

So I want to group Girard under Lacan, as a kind of semi-Lacan, obsessed with half of the Lacanian project...

I have more to say on this, but have already butchered this much of it... so I'll leave off for now.

Le sujet désire, mais il ne sait pas quoi. Dans son errance, il va croiser un être pourvu de quelque chose qui lui fait défaut et qui semble donner à celui-ci une plénitude que lui ne possède pas. Cette apparente plénitude, si proche et si lointaine, va proprement le fasciner. Le désir affamé du sujet semble toujours poser la même question au modèle : "Qu'as-tu de plus que moi ?" (pour paraître si heureux, pour avoir une si jolie femme, pour être le préféré de la direction, etc.).

Fixer son attention admirative sur un modèle, c'est déjà lui reconnaître ou lui accorder un prestige que l'on ne possède pas, ce qui revient à constater sa propre insuffisance d'être. Ce n'est bien évidemment pas une position des plus confortables mais l'homme qui admire, et qui par delà envie l'Autre, est d'abord quelqu'un qui se méprise profondément. Mais si le modèle est si parfait, c'est qu'il doit détenir quelque chose dont le sujet est pour l'instant démuni : objet matériel, attitude, statut, etc. Les variations sont infinies pour un résultat toujours identique : ce qui le différencie de l'Autre justifie, aux yeux du désir du sujet, la réussite et le prestige qu'il lui accorde.

Le désir qu'a le sujet pour l'objet n'est rien d'autre que le désir qu'il a du prestige qu'il prête à celui qui possède l'objet (ou qui s'apprête à désirer en même temps que lui l'objet). C'est ainsi que s'institue la médiation du modèle et une première transfiguration de l'objet. Par exemple, une voiture est plus que cette carcasse d'acier permettant de se déplacer d'un endroit à un autre, sinon n'importe quel modèle ferait l'affaire ; elle est l'instrument qui permettrait au sujet d'être, à l'instar de son modèle, un "tombeur", un cadre supérieur, un chef de bande, etc. Ce que vise le désir n'est bien sûr pas la possession de l'objet-voiture mais ce qu'il croit que cette possession lui donnera, comme à l'Autre, en termes de conquêtes féminines ou d'identification sociale.

Avant Girard, Hume, Smith et Keynes notamment, ont traité de la «sympathy» et du mimétisme.
Citons, par exemple, David Hume dans son 'Traité de la nature humaine' :

Nous pouvons remarquer en général que les esprits des hommes sont des miroirs les uns pour les autres, non seulement parce qu’ils reflètent les émotions d’autrui, mais parce que les rayons des passions, sentiments et opinions peuvent s’y réverbérer de nombreuses fois, et peuvent s’affaiblir petit à petit de façon insensible. Ainsi le plaisir qu’un riche tire de ses possessions, étalé aux yeux du spectateur, suscite chez ce dernier plaisir et estime ; lequels sentiments à leur tour, perçus par le possesseur qui sympathise avec eux, accroissent le plaisir de celui-ci ; et réfléchis une fois encore, donnent au spectateur un nouveau motif de plaisir et d’estime.

Par exemple, l'éclat de ces miroirs induit probablement le fait que les acteurs et actrices ayant reçu un Oscar ont, en moyenne, une espérance de vie supérieure de 4 ans à ceux qui ne sont que nommés. Sans compter que le plaisir et l’estime du sujet frustré ont leur revers :

Seul l'être qui nous empêche de satisfaire un désir qu'il nous a lui-même suggéré est vraiment objet de haine. Celui qui hait se hait d'abord lui-même en raison de l'admiration secrète que recèle sa haine. Afin de cacher aux autres, et de se cacher à lui-même, cette admiration éperdue, il ne veut plus voir qu'un obstacle dans son médiateur. Le rôle secondaire de ce médiateur passe donc au premier plan et dissimule le rôle primordial de modèle religieusement imité.
('Mensonge Romantique et Vérité Romanesque', R. Girard)

On peut alors considérer l'autre désir, à savoir le désir autonome, même s’il existe toujours une part consciente ou inconsciente de désir mimétique, comme plus intense, plus réelle et source de moins de tourments. A cultiver donc.

The first of these is straightforward enough: Girard equates "revelation" with the message of the gospels. But then it is a revelation that purely textual and thus handed over to the whole world: "This is proof that revelation is making its way among us." (p. 114) Very interesting. This is all the more important in that Girard sees revelation as provoking a crisis of interpretation: "From the anthropological perspective the essential characteristic of the revelation is the crisis it provokes in every representation of persecution from the standpoint of the persecutor." (p. 114)

"Revolution" is used in two different ways that are fundamentally at odds. He refers to his own work as a revolution on page 114: "The experts see none of what we have been discussing . . . . This is always the case at the beginning of great revolutions." But then he goes on to speak of "revolutionary" as the structural opposite of "conservative," thus as meaning essentially "liberal." (p. 115) That this is just an unfortunate equivocation is a real possibility, and one I'll grant him in the name of the use he gives to the third term.

"Radicalism" appears as a feature of the evangelical message: "This is what constitutes the unparalleled radicalism of the revelation." (p. 115) But this situates---or at least, ought to situate---Girard's project in a diagonal (sorry, Robert) position to the dialectic of the world of politics (which he explicitly cites on that same page, in fact, in the very next sentence: "To understand it we must briefly evoke, in contrast, the political thought of the modern Western world").

Hence, the three terms in relation to one another: the revelation of the gospels cuts across the dialectics of political economy, and it does so, as it inevitably it must, in a radical or revolutionary way. But then I'm still disturbed by the pairing up of liberalism with revolutionary thought: though the equation of terms occurs precisely when Girard is rejecting "revolutionary" politics right along with "conservative" politics, does it not signal that he somehow (unconsciously?) equates liberalism and his own project? In the end, I think this will be the inevitable conclusion to be drawn...

But let me get on with the text. The picture Girard presents in this chapter is actually quite straightforward. He divides all texts up into two groups, both with a particular relation to the scapegoat: either a text presents us the "scapegoat of the text" or it presents us the "scapegoat in the text." (p. 119) The former category presents the scapegoat as guilty, hence, not as a scapegoat; the latter presents the scapegoat as innocent, hence, as a scapegoat. And this simple dichotomy covers the entire ground: "it provides me with a marvelous counterproof, the quickest, most intelligible, and surest means of sweeping away all the false ideas that are so abundant today, not only in the areas of mythology and religion but also in everything that involves interpretation." (p. 124)

Girard is thus developing a full-blown hermeneutics, one that "provides" the critic with a taxonomy that totally represents the entirety of texts: all texts are generated by the crisis provoked by the real event of persecution. Hence, two provocations: first, the real persecution event provokes the writing of a text, from one of the two standpoints provided by Girard's basic typology; second, the mere existence of the second of the two possible kinds of texts provokes the work of interpretation by conflicting fundamentally with the essential dissimulation that is at work in the first of the two possible kinds of texts. Two provocations, but a single dialectic: the real gives itself to two interweavings, one simply imaginary (the persecution text) and the other fully symbolic (the revelatory text). It is the conflation of these two types of text that is our "general cultural schizophrenia," as Girard says. (p.121)

Now, I've begun to put this all in terms of Lacan (and I'm beginning to be convinced that Girard was versed in Lacan... I'll have to look into that). But it seems to me that it comes shy of Lacan in a number of ways, though that is something I need to think about at much greater length. In the end, though, I think this will be the most fruitful way of approaching Girard.

In the meanwhile, there is something I'm not quite settled about here. There is something that just doesn't seem right, though I can't yet put my finger on it. Soon enough...

In a paper published by the Journal of Religion and Society in 2006, Gary F. Jensen explores Religious Cosmologies and Homicide Rates among Nations. He analyzes homicide rates among nations as correlates of each nation's cosmological world view based on the World Value Survey. When cultures emphasize cosmic dualism (God vs. Devil), claim absolute truth for their world-view, and accept rigid dichotomies between good and evil, they also have higher rates of homicide. Where religion is valued more as ritual (church attendance), homicide rates are lower.

Much of the paper focuses on the statistical complexities of a study considering multivariant approaches (ruling out other factors that influence the numbers besides just religiosity). The way of labeling nations was also nuanced: some nations had a high belief in God and low belief in the Devil. These were not truly "Dualist" so considered "God-Only". Some had equal rates of belief in God and Devil but the rate of belief in either idea was low. These were considered "Secular" nations. Nevertheless, the biggest difference in murder rate was between the "Secular" and "God-Only." The Devil wasn't always the bad guy. Religious zeal, it seems, is the real Boogey Man.

Now the interesting part: how to explain the relationship.

Jensen cites a current theory in criminology that links homicide rates to economic disparity. But he eventually dismisses this argument, except as a possible feature of the religiosity argument. In other words,

A more reasonable explanation for the high homicide rates would focus on religious and moral cosmologies. Indeed, it is reasonable to propose that variables such as inequality may have significant, but indirect, consequences for homicide by reinforcing dualistic moral cosmologies. High levels of inequality may be associated with high levels of “us-versus-them” views of the moral cosmos and tendencies to blame external forces for interpersonal problems.

Religion has been shown to have a general impact on instrumental crimes, and the U.S. is ranked lower in burglary, suicide, and narcotics usage than other industrialized nations. The U.S. rated high for "dualism" and "religious passion," as well as high for homicide. Jensen concludes that it is lethal violence, not crime itself, that distinguishes the U.S. from other industrialized nations.

So, what does this tell us from a Girardian perspective?

Scruton’s generalization is the same one criminologists were making before these homicide studies, that religion doesn’t cause violence but solves it. Religion, it appears, is not one thing but many things, and it's really the focus of religion that seems to matter. If it's more about defining truths, it's deadly. If it's about ordering lives and habits, it's not so deadly. In any case, I'm reminded again that Jesus didn't start a religion. He was all about subverting it. I'm getting a clearer picture of why.

Believing that religion, as a general feature of life, is benign goes against a certain gut-level understanding we all have. We’ve seen calls for murder from televangelists, protest signs condemning children to hell, and the abortion doctor hit lists. We’ve seen Jesus, a man of peace and social justice, used to legitimize hoarding, indifference, and self-absorption as Christians grow more concerned about whether they are an “elect” bound for Heaven than whether their neighbor is hungry. Then there are the recurring episodes of mass murder in God’s name -- the Holy Crusades, unending, except that they may finally end if we ever leave Iraq.

That sounds like the Girardian Apocalypse of all-against-all, the exact thing religion is supposed to alter through the scapegoat mechanism: changing the society-ending violence of all-against-all to the release-valve sublimation of all-against-one. Yet, from all the surveys, religion is increasingly strong in the U.S., whereas countries considered “secular” have much lower rates of lethal violence. So, is the safety mechanism that's supposed to manage the violence of escalating mimetic rivalry failing? Apparently not, so how are these increasing rates of lethal violence explained by Girard, who forsees apocalyptic retribution only when religion fails?

Religion is a buffer for rivalry, but is rivalry truly a foundational drive, the foundational drive? Should we really privilege rivalry as the essence of being human and the architect of culture, or will we get further to recognize it as just a pliable motivator, easily manipulated by cultural mechanisms more foundational, more obscure?

Maybe all this murder is really just the effective use of scapegoating. This is what Jensen's study seems to suggest as the motivation for a religious passion that uses violence against others as just retribution for perceived slights rather than against themselves for perceived failure. Jensen will warn us that these "patterns were supported using nations as units of analysis, and should not be used to reach conclusions about the characteristics of individuals and their involvement in violence."

So maybe the U.S. is just a scapegoating success story, where our blindness to motivation, our ease at blaming others, has reached such a density that the drops of violent release just appear to be an ocean of retribution.

C'est que dans le grand parti de la gauche, le désir mimétique parait avoir tout emporté. C'est que l'on n'y semble vouloir exclusivement ce que ce que les autres veulent, y éviter très précisément ce que les autres évitent, dans un jeu de miroir sans fin, dans  un infernal tourbillon où les acteurs de la dernière présidentielle semblent irrésistiblement aspirés.

On se perd d'admiration des infinies symétries entre la candidate et le premier secrétaire, entre la compagne et le compagnon, entre les éléphants et les gazelles, entre les rénovateurs et les autres rénovateurs, entre les insultes narcissiques blessantes et les déclarations narcissiques blessées, entre les cultes de l'image, entre les victimisations croisées, entre la fuite du parti et la recherche du parti, entre tout ces malheureux désirs qui comme l'explique Girard ne sont pas pour eux-mêmes mais uniquement parce que les autres les ont désirés.

Ceux qui sentent la profonde stérilité de ce narcissisme collectif ne peuvent pas ne pas rêver de grands espaces, de nouvelles traces, d'ailleurs renouvelé. Mais pour sortir du tourbillon du désir mimétique, on ne peut se satisfaire de nouveaux désirs qui seront aussi prestement imités. Il faudra s'écarter radicalement du mimétisme de la dernière présidentielle, c'est-à-dire n'être ni l'ancienne candidate ni ses anciens opposants, ni rejouer l'assaut du dehors ni avoir déjà été haut dirigeant, ni fredonner la rengaine de la nouvelle garde ni déclamer la protection de l'ancienne.

C'est du cœur du parti que devra naitre une nouvelle forme de légitimité.

This movie would work really well in contrast-comparison against the new American movie, "Shortbus." Contrast cultural differences. Community and its breakdown.

Few minutes after writing the above I read a Commentary by A S Byatt at TLS--http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article2960112.ece

Byatt thinks the work of cognitive scientists may help show us a way out of the narcissism of the late 20th Century novel as explored by, say, Philip Roth. Here are her last two paragraphs--

During my lifetime we have used various metaphors for the activity of the mind – when I was a girl it was seen as a telephone exchange. Later it became fashionable to describe the brain as a computer – though a computer was constructed by a brain. In the past few years the work of Jean-Pierre Changeux has furnished us with descriptions, both purely physical and philosophically theoretical, of the way the brain puts the mind together. When he describes the relations between axons, dendrites, perception, memory, concepts and the world outside a brain, I feel I am reading a description of what I always sensed was happening, but could not describe. He is interested both in a biological and chemical “grammar” or algebra, and in the way in which things we perceive are retained – by the neurones – and combined to make “images” and “concepts” which are made by strengthened and stabilized collections of neurones, related both by the “pruning” of the sensory input and the combinations resulting from the way the mental objects are linked.

This may seem a little abstract in the context of a paper on the novel. A novel is made of language, and arouses both feelings and thoughts in its readers, as it should depict both feelings and thoughts in its people and its microcosm. Changeux’s descriptions of the cells of the brain and the way they combine and recombine give me a sense of understanding the excitement, the drive, the pleasure, I get out of making worlds with words. We have had a lot of the body as desire, and listened to many professors of desire. There is something else – the human capacity to think, and to make feelings into thoughts. It is a way out of narcissism.

The overarching argument of the chapter can perhaps be summarized rather simply: "The Gospels do indeed center around the Passion of Christ, the same drama that is found in all world mythologies . . . . But this same drama is also needed to present the perspective of a victim dedicated to the rejection of the illusions of the persecutors. Thus the same drama is needed to give birth to the only text that can bring an end to all of mythology." (p. 101) In a sense, this is a variation on something C. S. Lewis says in Surprised By Joy: the Gospel narratives in the New Testament bear every sign of world mythology (Jesus is the Corn God, etc.) except...

Much of this chapter is a fleshing out of this claim (though the last couple of pages of the chapter will make some startling steps forward beyond this claim in what is to me to the promising moment of this book so far). I don't see any particular need to take up in any detail the way he does this fleshing out: it amounts to a clarification of the roles of the Old and New Testaments, but it seems sufficiently straightforward as it appears in the text.

Now, I want to accomplish two other things in this brief reflection. First, I want to get a few concerns on the table, what it is that makes me suspicious of this project. Second, I want to look at what Girard does at the conclusion of the chapter and how that makes me wonder whether all of my suspicions should not simply be thrown out the window. First, then, to the question of discomfort.

A sentence like the following makes me nervous, to say the least: "The scapegoat mechanism . . . becomes the most talked-about and well-known news." (p. 108) It almost appears here that Girard equates the euangelion, the Gospel or Good News, with the recognition of the scapegoat. In the last analysis, I think that is precisely what Girard means to do. And that makes me quite nervous: is there not a kind of banalizing of the Gospel at work here, the assertion of a kind of almost vulgar equation of the Enlightenment and the Atonement? Several things in the chapter would seem to point in this curious direction. A good example is this: "Marxists, Nietzscheans, and Freudians for once all agree on this one point---that the Gospels are at fault." (p. 109) Now, honestly, what kind of a statement is that? While there most certainly are Marxists and Nietzscheans and Freudians who see the Gospels as being at fault, it is hardly true that they "all agree" on such a point. Indeed, what seems to me to be so redemptive about what Girard does in the last couple of pages of this chapter are perhaps redemptive precisely because the project suddenly seems to become Lacanian, that is Freudian, Marxist, and Nietzschean, all in one move.

The clincher, of course, is this: "It becomes increasingly clear: after German idealism all the ups and downs of contemporary theory are no more than petty arguments meant to prevent the demystification of mythologies, new mechanisms for retarding the progress of biblical revelation." (p. 110) On the one hand, this statement would seem to be simply wrong, especially in light of his indictment of the three "masters of suspicion": it is precisely Freudian psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Nietzschean genealogical thought that has attempted to demystify all mythologies in the past two centuries. Now, it is not exactly so simple as that, because Girard might be here simply condemning what Terry Eagleton groups under the rather broad term "postmodernism": (bad) pomos do their mystifying work all to often in the name of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, and there is reason to think, of course, that it is only this that he is critiquing. But if so, it seems it would have been far more responsible of him to make that point quite clear.

Let me be quite clear myself: I don't mean here just to accuse Girard of being irresponsible toward good Marxists, Freudians, and Nietzscheans. Rather, this irresponsibility is symptomatic---as any good Freudian/Marxist/Nietzschean might put it---of something still more disconcerting: the apparent plug here for German idealism! Girard unapologetically here calls for a return to German idealism, does he not? He calls for a return to Hegel. But let me be still more faithful to Girard's text: by saying "German idealism" rather than "Hegelianism," he seems to be pointing toward the broader (right) Hegelian project rather than to the rather difficult work of Hegel himself (which inevitably involves us in the broader thrust of Freudian, Marxist, and Nietzschean work anyway). What Girard calls for---let me at last be quite clear on this point--is thus a return to an absolute (the pun is intended and appropriate) marriage of the Enlightenment and the New Testament. Actually, "marriage" isn't strong enough: he is equating them. Girard wants us to take up the right Hegelian project of the nineteenth century. I have so many qualms about that project that I can't even begin to explain them here.

That equation, in a word, disturbs me.

But then what is Girard doing in these last couple of pages? He seems, quite suddenly, to offer a remarkably Freudian/Marxist/Nietzschean reading of a few key passages from the Passion narratives (and in this, at last, they "all agree"...). The brilliant move is this: "Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing" from Luke 23:34 is alerting the reader to the place of the unconscious! This absolutely amazing insight recasts the project of the Gospels as one of recasting the split subject, as forcing the mythological subject (the subject living in a world of myths... living politically, one could say) to come to be in a radically different way (radically; subjectively).

But then I have to ask this: does Girard not contradict himself here? Is this chapter not interwoven with two contradictory appeals, one to objectivity and one to subjectivity? I've got to think about this more.

You have to understand: my father was the most brilliant man who ever lived (the fact that you haven't heard of him is really just a comment on you), so how could he have been wrong about the natural violence of man or the virtuous influence of culture?

Nevertheless, I have to go with Steven Pinker's view that "the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions" is baloney. In A History of Violence, Pinker provides some important examples. Among them:

In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, '[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized.' Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth.

He particularly points to the violence of pre-state societies -- the number of bodies anthropologists find with axe wounds in the head, for example. He presents generalized observations based on statistics gathered by year, decade, century, but finds the "other major challenge posed by the decline of violence is how to explain it."

This, to me, is the most fascinating part. He lists four reasons for the reduction in violence:

1. Hobbes was right. "Life in a state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short, not because of a primal thirst for blood but because of the inescapable logic of anarchy."
2. Payne "suggests another possibility: that the critical variable in the indulgence of violence is an overarching sense that life is cheap. When pain and early death are everyday features of one's own life, one feels fewer compunctions about inflicting them on others. As technology and economic efficiency lengthen and improve our lives, we place a higher value on life in general."
3. Robert Wright "invokes the logic of non-zero-sum games: scenarios in which two agents can each come out ahead if they cooperate, such as trading goods, dividing up labor, or sharing the peace dividend that comes from laying down their arms."
4. Peter Singer suggests that evolution "bequeathed people a small kernel of empathy, which by default they apply only within a narrow circle of friends and relations. Over the millennia, people's moral circles have expanded to encompass larger and larger polities: the clan, the tribe, the nation, both sexes, other races, and even animals."

But I ask...where is Rene Girard in this analysis? If Pinker will allow complex systems like culture to affect human morality and evolution to provide for "empathy", why doesn't he allow for religious systems to have such an effect? Maybe he would consider Girard a subset of #4, but is mimesis the expansion of empathy driven by evolution to include nonfamily members?

I think Pinker's leaving something out to accept the notion that human behavior is no more complex than chickens imprinted on cardboard-box hens. In other words, all biological. This leads me to another weird realization (besides the Gould one) in that I find myself appreciating Richard Dawkins's idea of a "meme". 

Dawkins defines a "meme" as unit of human cultural evolution like a gene, that replication happens in culture as well as in nature. Memes replicate by people copying others. If memes replicate themselves as genes do -- selfishly -- then it's all about being successful in being repeated, regardless of your intrinsic value. Indeed, we can infer value by success, but that isn't a requirement. And for that reason, things like altruism may flourish, despite that those who adopt the meme may not flourish by it. Hence, Pinker has missed a reason not wholly tied to evolutionary causes, whether you imagine Dawkins or Girard has a better notion of mimesis. *wink*

Of course, the examples Pinker gives are really examples of earlier cultures and later cultures, not differences between natural man and cultural man (even prehistoric men had culture). In other words, maybe my daddy was right, but how would Pinker know? He's comparing different cultures, as if older cultures are somehow closer to nature than our own and therefore a better example of "natural" man.

I might be inclined, being a fan of Girard, to conclude that modern culture is qualitatively different from earlier cultures because we have come to see our own violence (via Christian culture). But Girard isn't so different from any of these theories. At least, it seems to me if we get the culture we have as a result of mimesis, then a violent culture is the result of a violent nature.  Like all the men Pinker lists, Girard, too, sees violence originating with nature, not culture.

But then I might be inclined to wonder why it took Christian culture 2000 years to overcome this violence. I mean, those Frenchmen burning cats were Christians, too, right? Maybe all those theories above are right. I'm inclined to think they're all wrong.

Our culture, which needs violence to sustain its structures and hierarchies, is very good at hiding its workings in myths. The "vicious ape" is one of those myths. Not that I believe in the "noble savage," either. Vicious Ape/Noble Savage are two heads of the same coin, tossed at our feet to distract us from the opportunistic cabal hoarding the surplus of a wasted utopia. Only a culture could imagine violence as an end in itself. Nature couldn't think up that.

I highly recommend Pinker's essay, because anytime I find myself questioning my daddy, it bears further analysis. Not to mention, you owe it to yourself to believe, at least for a moment, that you live in the best of times.

Chapter 7 essentially summarizes all of the chapters up to this point, and chapter 8 amounts to a rather short reflection on the future of these ideas.

Chapter 7: "Mythological transformation moves in only one direction, toward the elimination of any traces of violence." (p. 94) The idea here is rather straightforward: mythology comes into being as a kind of overt discourse that encodes but does not at all deny real collective violence (scapegoating); in a second stage, the mythology is reinterpreted in a more individualistic and ethical/moralizing way, in which collective violence gives way to individual evil; in a third stage, mythology is interpreted yet again in such a way that there is no violence at all (Platonic myth is a perfect example), and then it becomes the language of philosophical religion.

Now one must admit that this broad scheme is roughly Hegelian (and, as such, thoroughly modernistic): a kind of internal, perhaps necessary history of mythological development is being worked out, and it is thoroughly dialectical. At any rate, the pathway being traced is--as any good Lacanian would tell you--a movement from the real, through the imaginary, to the symbolic, and this trajectory is understood as one that is inevitably traced.

Chapter 8: As such, Girard can call his project scientific. He can announce that his project will, eventually, and especially given the clever way in which he's made his argument here, be accepted universally. As he puts it: "The day will come, however, when not to read the myth of Oedipus in the same way as Guillaume de Machaut does will seem as strange as it does to compare the two texts today." (p. 97) And all of this amounts to a serious criticism of postmodernism, perhaps from a politically radical (much like Eagleton's critique, perhaps?): "... it is easy to see how ridiculous certain contemporary attitudes are, or at least as regards their application to these matters. Critical thought no doubt is in a state of extreme decadence, temporary it is to be hoped, but the sickness is no less severe since it considers itself the supreme refinement of the critical mind." (p. 99) Three thinkers speak profoundly in those words: Lacan, Badiou, and Patocka. Where will all of this take us? And now especially as we turn to the texts of the Bible?

Jib Jab Hot Dog Shop

Location: Jib-Jab Hot Dog Shoppe - 313 S. State St.
Girard, OH 44420 - (330)545-1129
The Order: Two chili and cheese hot dogs and a large french fry.
The Service: The dogs were hot, the fries were hot and cooked with fresh oil, and most importantly, the order was correct.
The Taste: Buns were fresh, dogs were cooked and hot, chili spicy and textured, the cheese completely melted, and the fries freshly cut and cooked to a golden brown.
Presentation: Plain white cardboard boxes, no markings wrapped in a plastic see through bag.
The Value: Under 5 bucks for lunch. Acceptable for the quantity received.
The Rating: 4 out of 5 shots. Grassy Knoll Institute recommends Jib Jab hot dogs.

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LURKING ON THE GRASSY KNOLL

Lamacusa Tavern

15 South Davis St. Girard, OH 44420
Phone: (330)545-9151

The order: Fish sandwich on Italian bread with provolone cheese. Side order of french fries with cheese and bacon.

The Service: Standard take out service. The order was ready in the 20 minutes stated.

The Taste: The sandwich was very good. The fish cooked and breaded to a light golden brown. The bread was fresh. The cheese melted. The fries well cooked to a nice crunch. The food was hot.

Presentation: Standard styrofoam containers.

The Value: Under 5 bucks and that is a bargain for the amount of food received. Add the good taste and it's a steal..

The Rating: 4.5 out of 5 shots. The Grassy Knoll Institute Recommends Lamacusa's Tavern for lunch.

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LURKING ON THE GRASSY KNOLL

Jib Jab Hot Dog Shoppe

Location: 313 S. State St. Girard, OH 44420 - (330)545-1129

The order: Chili cheese dog, cheeseburger, large order of fries.

The Service: As always, very prompt and the order was correct.

The Taste: Chili dog, very good. Cheeseburger, average to good. Fries, very good. The buns were fresh, the fries cooked to a golden brown.

Presentation: Standard cardboard box and Styrofoam boxes.

The Value: All this for under 5 bucks. Pretty darn good deal.

The Rating: 4 out of 5 stars this time around. Grassy Knoll Institute recommends Jib Jab hot dog shoppe.

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LURKING ON THE GRASSY KNOLL

Without taking a breath, Pinker then leaps where you might have, pointing out the human tendency to frame subject matter through self-interest, such as describing the "liberation" of Iraq, or alternatively, the "occupation" of Iraq.

It seems logical enough, but it's one of those suspiciously inductive leaps. Doesn't it allow us to attach some pretty unsavory actions to processes we may barely control? Responsibility for manipulation, deception, even using coercion could be to some extent an innate process that might take a herculean effort to overcome.

Yes, I may be stretching my point. Still, from isolated experiments with worksheets or electrodes, testing children, adults, or even nonhumans, we elaborate theories of human cognitive development and behavior that we then base on innate processes. And often the behavior we describe is the kind we feel compelled to justify to someone, such as why women get boob jobs or why men are promiscuous.

In other words, we're trying to make something responsible for some aspect of our identity or action, an external reason we must act if we are to remain the good guys while leaving someone else holding the bag. In the age of Materialism, we don't need to blame demons and their human servants for our troubles. Our politicians use competing parties to frame their "us" versus "them" arguments. Scientists use genes. Even the LGBT community wishes to explain a social choice by declaring they have no biological one. We're always searching for new scapegoats.

Rene Girard explains violence in a way that agrees with common experience, and as his followers have shown, his ideas lead to obvious, if difficult to implement, solutions. He makes me think about scapegoating in new way, to look for scapegoats where I didn't before, to believe they must be there, even if they aren’t obvious and even if we don't kill them.

Where does the scapegoating impulse originate?

• If you believe the Girardian scapegoat mechanism that escalates from mimesis to rivalrous violence is human nature -- some innate, pre-cultural condition -- then you mean we bring this violent predisposition into any type of culture we might create, and you probably think education can help us identify our current scapegoats and resolve mimetic conflict without escalating into sacrificial violence. The culture itself can be the solution to our hereditary problem.
• On the other hand, if you believe the mechanism is more the result than the impetus of a particular culture, then you mean the structure and dynamics of the culture itself create the violence. If that’s the case, you probably don’t think education can prevent escalation because, for every scapegoat you see, others remain hidden. The violence goes underground because the structure of your culture requires it to exist.

J. Bottum (mentioned several times already in this blog) observed that "thousand-year" cultures are not created on scapegoating violence anymore because the modern world is too well-educated by Christian culture. Maybe. I wonder if it's just that our rivalry has been redirected and our scapegoats are not as obvious.

It may be interesting to note that Bottum’s examples of scapegoating regimes that had little staying power -- Hitler and Stalin -- were on the rise around the time when “[u]nequal rewards were ... morally justified. Add to this the prevailing economic view that the free market sets prices (whether for raw materials, products, or labor) by its own internal laws of supply and demand, and you had the makings of the perfect legal storm scholars call ‘laissez-faire constitutionalism.’” (Lew Daly, In Search of the Common Good: The Catholic Roots Of American Liberalism).

Lew Daly explains that kind of economic predation changed when “the great ‘social question’ of ‘poverty amid plenty’ erupted into history, and there was a war of moral ideas pitting the needs of the majority against the dominant ideology of the elites.” But later in the essay, Daly suggests we backtracked during the Reagan-Bush era, and “[t]he resulting extraordinary changes in family life have gone almost completely unaccounted for in American economic policy. Instead of helping families, government power helped big business extort more labor for less pay and less security, and it did so without interference from anyone’s ‘rights’.”

The rights he means are “[s]exual freedom, new constitutional rights of privacy, extreme secularism, and other agendas of the new social liberalism” which “shifted the whole framework of rights from the worker and his family and community, viewed as something in need of protection, to the detached individual of liberal theory and consumer culture, regardless of economic position or need.” In contrasting the sixties’ liberalism with the New Deal era’s focus on economic rights, he’s arguing individual liberty is not really different from arguing a freedom-of-contract philosophy that leaves corporations obligated to no one and claiming all parties in business have unfettered freedom -- implying equal power -- in choices protected by the constitution.

Of course, scholarship over the last hundred years has revealed how coercion truly works -- often not so overtly. But the more interesting thing to me is that Daly blames "individualistic social liberalism" for leading us away from the common good, and this is just that quality of Romanticism found most explicitly in a democracy, where, as Stephen L. Gardner writes, the “fundamental exigency” is “the claim to originality, individuality, or genius. In a world of equality, everyone must distinguish himself in order to count”, often through his desire (from Psychological Man: Eros and Ambition in Democratic Desire )

Yet it’s not just democracy that foster’s the revival of the Heroic individual, but a specifically patriarchal democracy, where perfection consists in being self-sufficient and self-determined and, in Dualism's parlance, male. As Gardner goes on to say, “The elemental myth of modern democracy is that of a ‘metaphysical’ freedom -- the notion that the individual must be the autonomous author of his own passion as of his true self, the source of his own being, if not biologically at least morally and psychically.” What he fails to note is that women in a patriarchy are not free to define themselves either morally or psychically. In fact, in any sort of social hierarchy, subordinate groups are restricted in those freedoms because the dominant group frames reality.

Daly is making the interesting argument that losing the progressive momentum with regard to New Deal economic reforms came at the expense of personal privacy reforms. Late-20th century focus on individual rights also reinvigorated the myth of moral justification for economic success; that is, the losers are merely the less competent players, so their loss is morally justified, and the winners are equally justified to their gain. The winners just happen to be those who play the accumulating game the best.

The thrust of Daly’s essay is to explain the impact of Catholic social justice theory on the New Deal, but even now, when the minimum wage is still controversial and still not enough, when women are still paid less than men and their domestic labor is not regarded as an economic value, when resources become significant only by the value added input of corporate profit and world-wide human rights and security take a back seat to corporate profit, I find Daly’s history a good meter for registering current scapegoats.

A myth is naturalized history, an attempt to leave an idea unexamined because it's framed as common sense or something innate, though it may be contingent upon time and place and perspective. The Reagan-Bush era is a “collateral result,” Daly says, “of social liberalism’s diminishment of the common good” and a distortion of the underlying religion which leads to the Neoconservative myth (revived from those Gilded Age capitalists) of a “free market”, which makes scapegoats out of those not privileged with the resources, structures, or permission to succeed. Though many modern eyes have grown sensitive to bloodshed, few have been sensitized to economic violence. So, when Gardner claims “[t]he inescapable power of the sacred is disclosed paradoxically in its decline, in the traces it leaves in the modern psyche”, I would disagree, pointing out the sacred has lost none of its power and remains plain to any but those who have made a myth of their economic system.

We don't have to burn witches anymore.

In their eyes collective murder is too scandalous to be authentic. They do not consider it a falsification of the text when they reinterpret that scene in their own fashion. They consider the transmission of the myth at fault. Instead of faithfully reporting the tradition handed down to them, their forefathers must have corrupted it because they could not understand it. In this myth, too, the violence that was formerly shared by many is attributed to one god only, Kronos, who as a result of this transference becomes truly monstrous. This sort of caricature is unusual in myths that portray collective murder. There is a certain sharing of good and evil: moral dualism appears as collective violence is eliminated.

I keep trying to find time to read some books on Lacanian psychoanalysis, so I guess this is why this passage stuck out to me. I think that the process of reading is a process through which we can tap into our unconscious and subconscoius selves and desires in really interesting ways. And I think that's one of Girard's most interesting insights, how he seems to take history as a process of pushing issues of mimetic rivalry further and further away from conscious mind so that it becomes more and more hidden in the recesses of our un-/subconscious minds, and therefore even more active and powerful in our lives and society (at least that's my guess as to what Girard's doing, a good chance I'm way off...).

Well, I've got to run. Please feel free to discuss this or any other topic of interest from the chapter (or previous chapters).

As to the schedule, if we do all of chapter 7 next week, I think we'll be back on schedule (Joe or Cheryl, I'll let you guys duke it out as to who posts next week...).

Also, if anyone else is interested, Joe and I are planning to start working through Patocka's Plato and Europe sometime in the next few weeks (this is partly in response to reading Derrida's The Gift of Death wherein he discusses Patocka quite a bit, and partly in response to a desire to think more about political issues in general). I don't think it'll be a problem having two books being discussed here simultaneously, and I sort of like the idea of having multiple projects going so that others can participate as time and interest allow.

I got thinking about this question in two different ways.

First, after reading Martha Reineke’s Sacrificed Lives: Kristeva on Women and Violence, which analyzes the importance of sexual difference within a sacrificial economy and draws on the ideas of Rene Girard and Julia Kristeva, I was struck by the point “sacrifice is the unhappy result of a converging set of circumstances.” In explaining Kristeva’s idea of the social contract we live under, Martha Reineke writes, “Fusion of the patriarchal code of sacrifice with a Symbolic Law of absence places women at absolute risk of violence when they are made to bear abject marks of the maternal body. So pervasive is the patriarchal influence on the social contract that Kristeva believes we truly do not know what men’s and women’s roles might be if the logic of separation legislated by the Law of the Symbolic order were to be inscribed in society nonsacrificially."

Kristeva comes at the subject’s development from a psychoanalytic point-of-view. Identity is formed in separation, learning you are something because you are not something else. You must lose the Mother, reject the “maternal matrix,” and really, be forever rejecting it, to become a functioning member of the Symbolic order. The Father is the gatekeeper to the Symbolic order, the one with the Phallus, and so the one with the authority all children want to emulate. Exactly how patriarchy develops from these different representations when these representations clearly rely on a patriarchal value system to encode them isn’t clear to me. But I wonder how this psychodynamic process of separation could ever lead to a matriarchal society. Perhaps only if Mother somehow acquired the Phallus. How does psychoanalytic theory explain a matriarchal society?

Second, I was reading some background material at Societies of Peace, Second World Congress on Matriarchal Studies, and Heide Gottner-Abendroth wants to be sure you understand that “matriarchy” is not just a reversal of patriarchy with women running the show in hierarchichal, accumulative, dominating fashion but a “system with its own rules.” She has based her outline of structures on a cross-culture analysis of matriarchal cultures with some vestiges still in existence today, including “the Mosuo, Yao, Miao and Tan peoples in China, the Chiang people of Tibet, the Minangkabau of Sumatra, the Ainu of Japan, the Trobrianders of Melanesia in the Pacific, the Khasi, Garo and Nayar of India, the Bantu, Akan and Ashanti peoples in Africa, the Berbers and Tuareg of North Africa, the Arawak peoples of South America, the Cuna and Juchitanians of Central America, the Hopi and Pueblo peoples as well as the Iroquois peoples of North America.” 

Among many interesting things, she has this to say:

On the cultural level, matriarchal societies do not have the concept of religious transcendence in terms of an unseen, untouchable, and incomprehensible all-powerful God, in contrast to whom the world is devalued as dead matter. In matriarchy, divinity is immanent, for the whole world is regarded as divine. This is evident in the concept of the universe as a goddess who created everything, and of Mother Earth, who brings forth everything living. And everything is endowed with divinity -- the smallest pebble and the biggest star, each woman and man, each blade of grass and each mountain.

In such a culture, everything is spiritual. In their festivals, following the rhythms of the seasons, everything is celebrated: nature in its manifold expressions, the different clans with their different abilities and tasks, the different genders and the different generations, following the principle of ‘wealth in diversity.’ There is no separation between sacred and secular; so everyday tasks such as planting and harvesting, cooking and weaving are, at the same time, meaningful rituals.

On the spiritual level, I define matriarchies as sacred societies and cultures of the Goddess. (Heide Gottner-Abendroth from Modern Matriarchal Studies)

It occurs to me you can’t have a “sacred” without also having a “profane” or “secular.” The Girardian mechanism of scapegoating can't work with a society that is all one or the other. One of the reasons Girard discovered his theory when he did is that the culture-preserving work of scapegoating has been failing to work ever since the advent of Christ, even more as Christian culture pervades the world. Scapegoating doesn’t work as a release valve if you see it for what it is, which is actually a bad thing, in a way, because that means the substitutionary violence of all-against-one becomes all-against-all, and societies can’t continue with such disruptive violence.

As J. Bottum pointed out in an article I mentioned a few weeks back,

Hitler sacrificed millions of Jews to found what turned out to be a twelve-year reich, Stalin made scapegoats of millions of ‘counterrevolutionaries’ to preserve a regime with only fifty more years of life, and every little dictator since has slaughtered his own victims to create or maintain an ephemeral authority. Thousand-year cultures are not founded by sacrifice anymore, for the process of scapegoating no longer seems to work very well. Everyone in the world has learned the Christian demythologizing of sacred violence too well, and no one trusts sacrifice to do what it once did. (J. Bottum from Girard Among the Girardians, First Things)

What is the most outstanding feature of modern Western society? Secularism. It seems to be what absolutists of all kinds fear, from conservative American ideologues to Middle East theocrats. Not that either one of those categories of people want entirely sacred societies. In fact, neither believes that the world is sacred, but only those men and places they name, set apart, and control. Those who would use the system of scapegoating need a carefully preserved mix of sacred/profane to make the system work. This isn’t to say you can’t have a civil religion masked as secularism. We have one in America. It’s called Consumerism, where malls are our sacred places. I recommend Jon Pahl's The Desire to Acquire: Or, Why Shopping Malls Are Sites of Religious Violence at the Chicago Divinty School website. 

So now I’m wondering about this sacred/secular bit. I know Girard looked at myths from all over the world and through history to develop his ideas, but did he find the scapegoat mechanism in any matriarchal societies? Did he even look there? Were all his examples based on societies with hierarchical, transcendent religions (thus patriarchy), or do immanent religions (such as those in matriarchies) feature the same mechanism? 

The scapegoat must start out profane, an enemy of God, and becomes sacred only after the fact of its murder. If everyone and everything is sacred, can you make scapegoats of any of them? Alternatively, as the modern West seems to be doing, if you deny anything can be made sacred, will you also avoid the scapegoat mechanism? This we don't seem able to do, which supports Jon Pahl above, as well as Roger Scruton, mentioned awhile back in this blog, in that religion is NOT “primarily about God but about the sacred” and “the experience of the sacred can be suppressed, ignored and even desecrated…but never destroyed.” Roger Scruton from The Sacred and the Human.

We're familiar with our own personal use of (nonlethal) scapegoats in our lives, and we form our identities and concepts of life having seen them in our culture and religion, from blame to murder. Scapegoating is so familiar, we take for granted that it is an intrinsic process of being human, like mimesis. But does one necessarily lead to the other, or is it like Kristeva says, that sacrifice is so pervasive in our patriarchal system that we can't imagine it any other way, so we say it's just human nature or, maybe, original sin? 

One of the most creative maneuvers of patriarchy was to make God entirely masculine (of course he’s not gendered literally, but all our language and images define him so). The unconditionally-loving, all-forgiving Christian God is “Father”. That’s not to say fathers can’t be that way, but patriarchal cultures go out of their way to strip men of their emotional “weakness." Fathers, as an idea, enforce the Law, they love on merit, and likewise, they disinherit for failure of all kinds. Mothers, as an idea, are the ones who love and forgive unconditionally. So why make God a “father”? Then God has a son, another masculine entity, but not just masculine, a man. Yet Jesus doesn’t act much like a man, at least, not a patriarchal man. In fact, throughout history, theologians conceived of Jesus’s body as feminine. He is descended of God and woman, after all. He got his human body from Mary. As for the Holy Spirit, even today people froth at the mouth anytime someone suggests the third Person may be thought of as feminine. Their unexamined argument is that God isn't gendered, so we must call God "him." Yet the Holy Spirit has a tradition of being feminine, both as a representation of Wisdom (always seen as feminine) and as a feminine noun in the Hebrew (lost through translation to Greek and then Latin).

Does Christianity work as Girard says it does because underneath all the camouflage it’s un-patriarchal, egalitarian, maybe even womanish? Maybe the only way to inject a little matriarchy into patriarchy was to disguise its feminine principles in Christianity through inversion, while taking pains to add invectives against women's equality -- you know, like the bigger the lie the more they'll believe it. Is this an indication that a matriarchal culture can avoid the scapegoat mechanism by avoiding the life of estrangement explained in psychoanalysis and the resulting lethal escalation of rivalry, which suggests Girard's theory began with the advent of patriarchy, not the evolution of humans? Maybe this is Girard’s true mystery, the real “things hidden since the foundation of the world.” At least, the patriarchal world.