Girard discovered the answer. Society has survived because it has developed a mechanism for concentrating violence on a limited number of victims. This he called the “scapegoating mechanism”. In fact the scapegoating mechanism exploits the very mimetic mechanisms that render it necessary for society’s survival. People who fall into violent, obsessive desire quickly lose their grip on reality. It is easy to convince them that the source of their frustration – their inability to satisfy their mimetic desires without running into violent conflict – is the fault of some group of scapegoats. It is important for the scapegoats to be a disenfranchised minority, so that the violence of society can be turned upon them without fear that they will be avenged. Here, again, Girard’s theory renders unsurprising that which economists and political scientists are at a loss to explain: for instance how the favoured ‘cure’ for economic depression is to visit structural violence upon low-paid immigrants, racial minorities, the homeless, the unemployed and the disabled.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
In summary, there is this:
the most historically common form of spontaneous order is that of a human community tacitly agreeing to vent all of its violent frustration upon a defenceless subgroup.
I have some doubts about Girard’s core hypothesis, which is that we all want the same few goods. It seems to me that there are all sorts of things that other people want which interest me not at all. By the same token, many of my most favorite pastimes seem to be shared by only a few others.
The theory that our tastes are modeled on the tastes of others may be right, but I am not sure that its implications are as dire as Girard would have it. When I go to a folk dance session, it is true that I will like a dance more when there are others who also like the same dance. But I don’t want to kill them so that I can “possess” the dance. Quite the contrary.
In fact, I think that this is generally true. Nobody wants to be the only person who owns an i-Phone. Even with status goods, we all want others to own them, in order to validate our tastes.
I am sure that in some sense we sometimes desire that others have less than they do. But I am not ready to sign on to the idea that this is a major driver of a lot of our behavior.
That bit about visiting ‘structural violence’ seems to be awfully contrived and stretching the concept past it’s limits. These writers really lose me when they use language like that.
See Adam Curtis’ “Century of the Self” for an overview of this tradition; Freud, Bernays, all that mess. You can use Curtis’ work as a survey even if you don’t agree with his conclusions.
I think there’s something to this – each lynching was a small Krystallnacht. But the problem is that Freud, having invented the unconscious, now had to use it to explain everything.
I dunno.
Girard does not speak of gold but rather blood. He’s largely post/late-Freudian ( as in “Civilization And Its Discontents”).
His mimetics do not mean that desires – in the sense that an Edward Bernays might mean them – exist completely independently of social structures. The classic experiment is – take two small children, possibly children that don’t speak yet. Introduce a toy. As soon as one child wants it, the other will immediately want it. Some strange communications-thing has just happened.
This is the base- hardware – layer. The same basic mechanism has evolutionary/anthropological use in forming a strong common bond within a tribe through combat. We all know the story that men (for now) who’ve experienced combat together have this bond. I can’t reproduce that derivation myself, but observe that it’s in his writing and interviews.
“Posessing the dance” seems incoherent ( you’re doing a reductio? ).
What this guy misses completely is that the mechanism of formal religion was developed – as a technology – to offer absolution to soldiers in war – think Vikings and Valhalla. We had a parallel mechanism – trade – which increased to reduce dependence on conquest. Christianity in Girard’s universe is posited as an answer to mimetic violence through an abstract Universal Scapegoat. This explains Christianity’s curious pervasiveness on behalf of the anthropology crowd.
By constraining spontaneous order to only violence, the author has sapped the foundations of his own writing. These things are all ad hoc, informal and sedimentary – un-designed ( even as I use the language of design in the above paragraph ). His moral point is sitll valid – if people consciously thought about scapegoating, we’d be better people. But it seems an unlikely criticism of markets.
Girard is compelling, but it’s still using narrative to confirm/dismiss narrative. It’s related strongly to French post-modern thinking. So I dunno if it’s anything or not. Seems all a bit Hari Seldon in a lot of ways. Be nice to know if Hari Seldon was a reductio, too….
I was largely unimpressed with the scapegoating thesis until I read the FDA’s vaping rule this morning.
What was it? I’ll venture a guess. The FDA wants free option value on power over vaping.
Confirmed.
Which part of the Trump phenomenon are you talking about? The part where he is trolling, or the part that even mild trolling makes the left go ape-opleptic?
Analogously, try suggesting, for example, in various gatherings that Caitlin Jenner is not a woman. You might get a taste of scapegoating for your scandalously unacceptable views. Nevermind the fact that Caitlin Jenner is, you know, not actually a woman. In other venues, however, Caitlin Jenner or the SJWs will be the ones targeted for derision.
Worse, there is a mechanism that exacerbates desires past the point where reasonable agreement remains an option. Your desire for X causes me to want X. My desire for X then leads you to want X even more. My desire is in turn strengthened, until the positive feedback mechanism brings both of our desires into the category of obsession: the greatest engine of unrestrained violence in human culture.
The problem I see with this is that, on an individual level, natural selection would tend to eliminate people prone to violent obsession over positional goods because the effect on fitness would be, uh,…rather negative in most circumstances. If I am ready to fight to the death over, say, fancy hats I can’t afford….then I’m Darwin Award fodder.
Now, if we’re talking about the group level, that’s a bit of a different story. But then, I don’t see how we’re not simply back in the world of good ol’ fashioned tribalism. I think Girard is simply wrong about this “mimetic desire” stuff. I think the real story is that the state of nature sucks because human populations quickly approach Malthusian limits and when a species which produces a lot more males than it requires in purely biological terms hits those population limits, then guess what? They’re going to fight over scarce resources.
My sense of it is that transitions from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies and from agricultural to industrial and then post-industrial societies increased resource production at each step, pushed Malthusian limits upward and outward, and reduced the intensity of resource competition and thus decreased the returns to violence, both at the individual and at the group level. It had nothing to do with “channeling violence toward defenseless scapegoats.” That is silly. The whole blog post is silly. This Girard guy sounds rightfully obscure.
“It is important for the scapegoats to be a disenfranchised minority”
How about Bernie Sanders’ scapegoats? They are not disenfranchised minorities at all.
We are wa
I don’t understand the Trump relevance. He does blame Mexico and China for problems here, but they are foreign counties, not internal, disenfranchised minorities. He wants to keep illegal immigrants out of the country, which doesn’t feel like “structural violence”, unless one considers all national borders to be inherently violent, and virtually nobody wants open borders anyway
First assume a world community, then the poor Mexican and Chinese immigrants are a disenfranchised minority. That may not make sense to you, but that’s how they think.
That’s not how Trump supporters think, that are supposedly the ones doing the scapegoating. Not to mention, Trump is happy to heap scorn on the Carriers of the world that want to ship jobs to other countries, and on the politicians that negotiated NAFTA and the deals that are supposedly “killing us”. This is a very different narrative than blaming all our problems on immigrants
The 1% are chosen specifically to be a disenfranchised minority.
The Trump populism is basically the same thing without the genius marketing.
Building a wall and keeping people out is not violent. I know the open borders crowd argue that borders are inherently violent and foreigners are disenfranchised minorities, but that just doesn’t make sense.
Japan and Israel and the gulf states and even India and China have refused immigration more aggressively than Trump or Viktor Orban. Are those nations hyper violent and “literally Hitler”? That really doesn’t make sense any way you slice it.
I can see those for whom success is all their own, that failure must be the fault of others, though often of a powerful, malevolent, conspiracy with the defenseless merely being their tools or victims, as themselves.
Another Theory of Why the Left has all the Answers and Anyone Who Disagrees is A Neanderthal. Yawn.
The trend in recent years is to define Cisgender Straight White Males as the evil group that deserves to be violently put down for their atrocities past and microaggressions present.
As some of the failures and contradictions of our system come to the forefront, the elites running things need someone/something to blame.
Sometimes its an abstraction like “racism”. Why did blacks burn down Baltimore? It’s all because of racism. Where does this racism come from? Aren’t the mayor and police chief of Baltimore black? Isn’t the state legislature overwhelmingly Democrat? More and more elaborate theories have to be invented. Most importantly those theories have to be non-flasifiable. If you could actually test for racism somehow, then someone might be acquitted, and then what’s the excuse for what’s happening? It can’t be elite mismanagement or false doctrine…
Reminds me a lot of the role of original sin:
Why are things shit?
Original sin.
How can we test for original sin?
You know…things are shit. So it must be true.
Isn’t that circular?
It’s a great mystery.
Why am I guilty of something you can’t prove, and why should I have to alter my life based on it? Aren’t you clerics just corrupt assholes trying to control me?
What are you, some evil heathen? We have punishments for your type.
Racism plays the roll of original sin. Middle/working class white people create racism, that’s “privilege” (doctrine). Therefore, they deserve whatever is coming to them. Anything that seems to go wrong with the system isn’t because its doctrines or managers are corrupt, its because the evil wreckers (racists) are messing things up. Thus the elite has a scapegoat for their failures.
Arnold, I think you are misunderstanding Girard’s theory. For instance your dancing example is not apt. Mimesis as such is not inherently conflictual, but acquisitive mimesis for scarce goods is. The goods most liable to cause conflict are not material goods, but mimetic-social goods like power or prestige.
Also, to some of the other posters: Girard was not a leftist. He had lots of fun skewering the pieties are the academic left.
For any interested, here are some lecture notes of mine that introduce the fundamentals of Girard’s mimetic theory: https://woodybelangia.com/what-is-mimetic-theory/
If I am one of the “other posters” to whom you refer, I was commenting on the quotation in Arnold’s post, not on Girard himself.
Got it. Thanks for the clarification. At least it afforded me the chance to remove the leftist taint that may attach to him as a French intellectual.
> Girard was not a leftist. He had lots of fun skewering the pieties are the academic left.
Perhaps, but Girard’s thesis seems perfectly consonant with the progressive attitude towards spontaneous social order.