Crumbs: November 27th, 2018. Margaritas ante porcos
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I've stumbled across an old, but good, counterpoint to Nietzsche developed by René Girard. In fact, Nietzsche's Dionysian vs Apollonian archetypes came up several times in the past week (on Twitter)! So I think it's time to write about it.
When Nietzsche was 25, he wrote a deep analysis of Greek tragedy called The Birth of Tragedy. In the book he develops a new theory about the yin-yang pull of Dionysos and Apollo in human culture. Dionysos represents destruction, instinct, formlessness, disorder. Apollo represents control, rationality, form, order. For Nietzsche, a healthy society contains a foot in both worlds. Naturally, he intensely disliked ideas that favored rationality at the expense of instinct: Socrates (for Greeks) and Christianity (for the West). Nietzsche likens Christianity to playing the same role as Socrates: repressing the Dionysian potential. Reason over feeling.
We'll circle back to Nietzsche later, but first we have to detour into what Girard sees in Christianity. He reads something new into Christianity that I can't stop thinking about: 'mimetic desire' and 'sacrifice of the scapegoat'.
The term mimesis is derived from the Greek mimesis, meaning to imitate. The OED defines mimesis as "the deliberate imitation of the behavior of one group of people by another as a factor in social change". Humans are mimetic machines. We copy our desires from other people.
Mimesis can be good: it works wonders when the models humans copy are cooperative and generative. In theory, if we were completely surrounded by egoless altruists, there'd be no risk of copying and transmitting bad desires. Turns out, this is not the case.
Mimesis can be tragic: it creates catastrophic runaway feedback loops. You see, everybody wants this thing, then everyone thinks everyone else wants this thing, then we all start fighting to acquire the thing. Often we forget the object of desire altogether and just start fighting each other. For no good reason! This negative mimetic behavior happens in all social groups -- big or small. Where warring civilizations didn’t just collapse entirely, the most common resolution involved polarizing and channeling all the hostility into one particular person. A scapegoat.
At some point in every budding culture's history, some kind of internal conflict would lead to violence and chaos. The solution was for everyone to gang up, unite against a scapegoat, and perform the sacrifice. So, scapegoats can turn conflict into peace. Go ahead, try to think of an exception. And if you can't -- time to accept this very bitter pill: any culture that had any amount of permanence on this earth had a way of channeling internal conflict into a sacrifice. The ones that didn't...simply didn't survive.
The more permanent the society, the more ritualized the process. For example, Gauls would just hold a footrace to select the sacrificial victim. Others would have a random selection process, like bake a cake and cut it into pieces. Charcoal in your cake? BOOM: sacrificed.
Not all scapegoats were hated all the time. Very often, they would be worshipped before they were sacrificed. People would give the scapegoat a certain amount of power before tearing them apart. That scapegoats were either worshipped or demonized follows from their being all-powerful.
Religions picked up on this natural human process of mimetic ruin. Religion emerges in the form of rituals and myths around sacrificial scapegoating in order to reconcile violent rivalries and re-bond a community around the ‘othering’ of a victim. So, in a sense, practicing a religion was rational for a civilization because it helped them mitigate the ruinous downside of mimesis while keeping the upside. By adopting a religion, the culture solves for internal conflict so everyone else can work on winning. Or solving math problems. In order to improve, you must first survive.
So Girard reads something unique in the Christian religion: Jesus' message explicitly rejects scapegoating. For scapegoating to work, the victim must be perceived as guilty and deserving of their victimization, while simultaneously the arbitrariness and innocence of the scapegoated victim is denied. However, The Passion of Christ is an acting out of the scapegoating mechanism, but with the overwhelming assertion of the ‘truth’ that the victim is innocent. The Christian revelation of the innocence of the victim for Girard is the unique ‘truth’ in human history.
Jesus reveals the process of scapegoating and encourages humans to refrain from participating -- to become individuals against the madness of crowds. The Gospels specifically advise us to refuse the crowd's escalating mimetic desires: let he who is innocent throw the first stone. The Gospels encourage readers to become individuals -- to question the legitimacy of the status quo (crowds) and to defend victims from scapegoating: turn the other cheek.
Girard argues that the Satan of the Gospels is the social order itself, and that Christ’s message is that people should imitate Him in standing against the persecution and victimization latent in that order. The true cause of Peter’s denial, of Pilate’s behaviour, of the bad thief’s attitude, is their imitation of the crowd, the collective mimetism, the violent contagion. Satan is the whole mimetic system. Satan is temptation, Satan is rivalry that turns against itself. The mimetic system, in its eternal return, enslaves humanity.
How can you have a culture without a functioning scapegoat mechanism? Well, you can't. Once seen, you can't unsee it. Girard thinks that all Western cultural development has essentially been a progressive assimilation of the Christian message about the innocence of the victim. Jesus' message undermines itself. But its pedagogical lesson about victims lives on in all of us. We imitate Christ when we become individuals who criticize the violent cultural order's legitimacy -- and transcend it. Then the process continues infinitely, in a continual figure-ground inversion. The persecuted become the status quo become the persecutors.
Got it? Well, in case you followed I can now circle back to Nietzsche. Remember: Nietzsche despised Christianity. Girard comments: 'Nietzsche is the only true, and the only, Nazi thinker'. Why? Because Nietzsche was advocating for a return to Dionysian neo-paganism -- a glorification of the myth-making, of scapegoating, of the destruction of crowds. That's it. Was it worth it? Maybe. Funny thing is: both Girard and Nietzsche got scapegoated for their analyses of human ethology.
We still perform mimetic escalation and scapegoating today -- it's just less violent of a process than before. Christianity didn't remove these problems from our nature, but it taught us how to recognize and improve upon it. For example, startup founders become gods then they become despised. Sometimes they come back from the dead. Zuckerberg, Elon, Bezos...etc etc. The political version involves certain ideological distortions. People on the left and the right tend to focus and even obsess on people from the other side. Everybody from the other column becomes the crazy person and the legitimate scapegoat. In reality, the truth is that it tends to involve some strange combination of both.
This is all very dense. Here's what a Boiled Down Girard means for me:
We copy our desires from others
We settle internal conflicts by creating a scapegoat and killing it
Christianity defends against scapegoating by revealing the innocence of the victim
Given the above propositions, what should you be careful of doing?
Watch your beliefs. If they match your peer group's closely, they're probably copied.
Don't compete -- most likely you're just competing over desires you've copied from others
The usual narrative is that society should be organized to cater to and reward the people who play by the rules. Things should be as easy as possible for them. But perhaps we should focus more on the people who don’t play by the rules. Maybe they are, in some key way, the most important. Maybe we should let them off the hook.
There's a lot more places to go with this (and parallels to draw), but imma leave it here. As always, send me your thoughts!