Girard, René
▶ Watch on YouTubeCoverage note: full (about nineteen minutes; automatic English YouTube captions, apparently from a voice-over of an Italian original, with some awkward phrasing and a stray Russian word at the end)
Core ideas
Mimetic desire and rivalry. Girard starts from the idea that people tend to desire the same things, imitating each other's desires. This is not conflictual in itself (children acquire culture by imitation), but it turns into rivalry when we desire what our neighbor desires. He reads the last commandment (not to covet) as a definition of greed as mimetic desire, and the move from the Old to the New Testament as a move from prohibiting objects to proposing a model: "imitate me". The key Gospel word skandalon means both model and stumbling block, an obstacle that fascinates precisely as a model. Animals settle rivalry by dominance patterns; among humans rivalry has no natural limit and spreads contagiously until the community converges against a single victim, the scapegoat, not especially guilty but the only way to restore unity.
Scapegoat, prohibitions, sacrifice. The scapegoat is both culprit and god, killed or expelled and then deified, the foundation of archaic religion and culture; the two primordial institutions are prohibitions (not doing what the victim did) and sacrifices (doing it again, killing a victim to save society). Girard credits Freud with seeing father-son rivalry but says he overvalued the family: rivalry is inherent in human relations and itself founds institutions. What distinguishes Judaism and Christianity is that they reveal the victim's innocence: the Passion narratives show how Peter, Pilate and the crowd turn against Jesus for mimetic reasons, and the dissent that appears in the Bible never appears in myth, where "the crowd speaks". So Christianity "divides what myth unites" ("I have come to bring war, not peace"), a process still under way; he reads John 15 ("they hated me without a cause") as a break in the cycle of violence and sees human rights as in effect the rights of the innocent victim, with modern law's principle of appeal as heir.
Violence today, forgiveness, restraint. Archaic societies were violent but orderly, with violence invisible to participants; Christianity makes the West more divided because we can no longer condemn without accusing the other of persecuting, and because forgiveness is hard when revenge is mimetic at its most mechanical. Forgiveness is popular but not taken seriously, and it threatens the identities built through unions against others (nationalist, family, professional, ideological). He sees both evil and progress (globalization), and warns against cynicism and naive optimism. Asked what is hardest to live as a Christian, he answers the truth of forgiveness. In modern society competition is channelled into economic and intellectual forms, but turns into psychic violence ("one can kill with words"); he defends self-control against the liberation of desires and rejects Nietzsche's "better a little real violence than a lot of resentment" in an age of modern weapons. Young people, he says, are not told the truth: we live in a world of absolute fragility.
Excerpts
“« Quite simply, this expression signifies that men generally tend to desire the same things, tending to mimic each other in their desires. »”
“« In myths it is always the crowd that speaks and there is never opposition to the crowd. »”
“« Christianity is the religion of hypocrisy, if you like, to the extent that it is the most difficult religion to live in its truth. »”