If one is a Girardian, then there is perhaps no greater catastrophe than the growing tendency of the American meritocracy to be incubated in elite colleges. Is it not worth fretting that the people running the country are coming in higher numbers from these hothouse environments at a young age, where one is inflamed to compete over everything and where tiny symbolic disputes seem like life and death struggles? How much of the governing class has fully adopted this attitude, and to what extent can we see our recent political problems to be manifestations of this tendency?
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Read the entire essay.
Wang links to a useful summary of Girard’s ideas.
If people imitate each other’s desires, they may wind up desiring the very same things; and if they desire the same things, they may easily become rivals, as they reach for the same objects. Girard usually distinguishes ‘imitation’ from ‘mimesis’. The former is usually understood as the positive aspect of reproducing someone else’s behavior, whereas the latter usually implies the negative aspect of rivalry.
Again, there is much more at this link. Wang’s idea is that when you throw a bunch of similar people together ini college, you make it natural for them to desire the same things and to be prone to conflict.
I admit that I am still trying to fully grasp these ideas.
A good overview by Girard himself here:
https://french-italian.stanford.edu/opinions/girard.html
Relates to my summary of the housing crisis: homes are great until everybody wants one.
It is also my critique of the social sciences and others when they act like social sciences. It is a bunch of W.E.I.R.D. people together deciding what to be interested in. They areally probably wrong.
Homes are great until everybody wants the same ones… =/
I find mimetic desire to be one of the strongest and most incisive explanations of many human pathologies. The larger structure that Girard built upon it is not as appealing to me, but the simple understanding that people determine what to desire by observing what others desire – with a bias towards high status people and a feedback that high status is conferred by obtaining things that other high status people (who have many people paying them attention…) have desired – is amazingly clear. It is also biologically sensible – animals learn what is good to eat, etc, by observing parents and peers. Add to this the simple observation that people are diverse and change, so that their complex needs are neither constant nor uniform, and you have a true recipe for the disasters that have befallen humanity.
growing tendency of the American meritocracy to be incubated in elite colleges.
When wasn’t the American meritocracy not dominated by ‘elite colleges’ How many of the founding fathers were elite plantation slaveholder owners? Or large businesses handed to down to their children.
My guess there is less ‘class disruptions’ than the immediate post-WW2 period but that era was the historical exception not the long term reality.
A big question is what happens to much libertarian economic or political analysis when one moves from mostly endogenous preferences to those with a strong exogenous component, with a lot of subconsciously-originating desires deriving from instincts towards conformity, conspicuous consumption signalling, and imitation of high-status behaviors? What is an individual’s “welfare” and “utility” with preferences like that? It’s clear that one gets a lot of fads and herd-mentality behaviors, could there be value in trying to prevent these? Etc.
Mimetic desire is a complement to imitation. The natural experiment – take two preverbal babies. If one wants a toy fire truck, then the desire for that fire truck will go up in the other baby. But why? And how?
Girard’s stuff expands to include scapegoating (which is presumably the same, mimetic mechanism ) and includes a weird, engineering sort of defense of Christianity as a mechanism for anti-scapegoating. That part gets weird fast. SFAIK, this led Girard to embrace Christianity. But it dovetails nicely with Jungian “othering”, and addresses blood sacrifice as a curiously persistent practice ( why would that be as much of a thing as it apparently is?) . It undergirds the sort of thing Daniel Goldhagen writes about – eliminationism in politics ( and more specifically, actual genocide )
I see Girardian overtones in fiction – I’d be willing to bet the writers of “Vikings” are at least familiar with his work, since so much of the show is contact between Christian and pre-Christian societies.
I had my own strong shock of recognition of Girard’s work, but it’s not clearly falsifiable and I’m not sure what’s to be done with it. It’s kind of a …category-killer of a just-so-story to my ear.
I also suspect that the conflict in the movie “The Election” ( Reese Witherspoon ) is essentially what Dan Wang is talking about. Basically, competitive pressures cause loss of perspective and fairly heinous behavior. This seems explainable by mimesis. It’s kind of reverse-scapegoating… or something. Perhaps mimetic-scapegoating-fractals or something. Obviously Dan is a better Girardian than I. 🙂
But Girard is definitely out there.
I think we’re waiting on the neuroscientists.
excellent comment, thank you Les. My initial reaction to Girard’s work was much the same as yours. I thought it was unfalsifiable and ridiculous. Took a while for it to grow on me and make me want to extend his own ideas.
I’ve never watched *The Election* movie, but I’m kind of familiar with the premise. I had wanted to add a line to say in the *Big Little Lies* section on how one can be not at all surprised that the girl who grew up turned into RW’s character. (But I forgot.) Now we can leave that as the Straussian take…
I am danwyd at gm.
Thanks very much, Dan. Excellent essay, BTW.
I never thought Girard was ridiculous. Indeed, I initially, instantly thought “this is[1] true, but I can’t really say why it’s true.”
[1] yes, *that* sort of “true”.
The “right supermarginal gyrus” seems to be the seat of the ( now overblown, as politics ) mechanism of empathy. If empathy has a seat in neural structure, then it seems a strong guess that mimesis is *probably* ( see my weasel words! ) somehow related. Maybe.
Still, just like most of neuroscience, even if we learn enough about this to use it in an engineering fashion ( which seems extremely dangerous ), our institutions run smack against the sort of change these things would imply.
Then again, Frontline tells me they are starting to accept the lesson of the original Eastern State Prison and stop putting people in long-term solitary – at least as much ( some prisoners are so disruptive that… what else can you do ?) as they can. But you’re one warden away from regression to the old way.
Perhaps the best use of Girard is simply to make people aware of mimesis. Which is, in its way, a really interesting proposition, especially given what is said of the frontal cortex. “*MY* favorite brain lobe can beat up your favorite brain lobe.” 🙂
Thiel borrowed from Girard the idea that mimetic desire or copying is ultimately unsatisfying and unprofitable, which can be traced back to Kojeve and Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. But we can take this further and ask what position does Thiel the philosopher occupies in the Kojevian system of philosophy. The answer is that he occupies the Spinozist-Parmenidean position.
http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpkojeve1.htm
But doesn’t “Zero to One” begin with a Heraclitean affirmation?: “Every moment in business happens only once.” But every philosopher knows that the deepest message is never presented on the first page of the book. Instead, Thiel rejects “experience” and “learning by doing” and “trial and error” and instead embraces the “secret”, the Thielian equivalent of “absolute wisdom” or the Parmenidean goddess. That’s why the book does not begin with an account of his business career, which would be the most natural place to start. Instead he begins with a philosophical apothegm which, in good Aristotelian fashion, turns out to be true, but only when modified by subsequent dialectical twists and turns. In this way “One to Zero” resembles Aristotle’s Physics, which oscillates dialectically between the poles of Parmenides and Heraclitus.