A Religious Anthropology of Violence: The Theory of Rene Girard

Prepared for the Series, Violence: Responses, Interpretations, Solutions, Explanations of the Obert C and Grace Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, October 28, 2002

”Look up there Watson! What do you see?”

“I see a magnificent sky full of stars,” answers Watson.

“ And what do you deduce from that?”

 “Well, astronomically I deduce that the summer solstice is approaching, and astrologically, that there are boisterous good times ahead because Capricorn is in the house of Virgo. Meteorologically I deduce that tomorrow will be a fine day and theologically, that God is in his heaven and all is right with the world.” “Watson you’re a fool,” snaps Holmes. 

“Why?” asks the chastened Watson; “What do you deduce Holmes?”

“That someone has stolen our tent!”

The evidence for Girard’s theory is like that tent, so taken for granted that many of us look right through it and when we do see it we regard it as too banal for words. Why? Because it is everywhere, in the dining room, the office, the bedroom and the barracks, and most of us think that for understanding something as complex as human violence we need to go far to fetch evidence and be ingenious in framing theories, integrate many intricate factors, and marshal subtle disciplines of thought. Watson sounds like the average academic deploying a range of disciplines to grasp different aspects of a far-fetched phenomenon, while Holmes sounds like a right-wing politician who simply knows the way things are. Both of these extremes are, of course, caricatures, and I should probably not have begun with that joke were it not for rhetorical custom. Nevertheless, it does warrant a brief consideration of 1) The evidence that needs to be interpreted before I come to 2) the role of theory in that interpretation and then to 3) the theory itself

1)     The evidence to be interpreted:

I have here to use a very broad brush to paint the picture of the mimetic theory, as Girard prefers to call it, so I ask your indulgence. I have given the organizers a written account of the theory and I hope you might see it if you are interested in the details. Girard picked up his first clues in literature. He studied what has vulgarly been called the French Triangle, the eternal subject of literature and the spice of life: Two women and one man, two men and one woman, a rivalry, violence and the breakup of the triangle by the death or expulsion of one or another or all of the protagonists. He saw this first in Cervantes’  “Don Quixote”, where, Anselmo asks Lothario to woo his fiancée, and in Dostoievsky where the perpetual husband seeks out the lover of his first wife and encourages him to start a similar relation with his second. This pathetic behavior indicates that these characters could not generate sufficient desire of their own accord, but had to have the example of others to warrant and direct it. Unless someone else desired his wife, the perpetual husband could not. From this Girard conjectured that desire imitates desire in the profoundest way, not consciously, not deliberately but helplessly. Jealousy is endemic to desire and desire the fundamental motivator of human action.

He generalized from these examples of what he calls hyper-mimetic characters to the conclusion that human beings learn from each other what to desire and thus what it means to be human, in so far as we are what we desire. Hyper-mimetic characters are not normal, to be sure, but their abnormality discloses what the rest of us are more successful at concealing. Few of us would go so far as to encourage someone to pursue our spouses but most of us take satisfaction in the fact that when we walk to our expensive seat in the orchestra heads turn and little vibrations of Eros and envy flutter through the house. Behold, the trophy wife! The function of the novelist is to reveal us to ourselves and for this purpose has often to portray our foibles and cravings larger than life.

We are therefore what the other makes us, because we view the world through the eyes of the other. We desire what she desires, and cannot bear to be different. The lie of Romanticism is that we are self-generating identities rather than nodal points in a network of communicating desire. Have you ever noticed how uniformly similar our cultural rebels are?

So far the evidence that desire, identity and community are mimetic is literary. I have mentioned Cervantes – who, by the way was recently judged the most influential figure in Western literature by a similar sociological center to the one that awarded Holmes and Watson the joke prize- and Dostoievesky. Girard draws further on Stendahl, Proust, Shakespeare, and latterly, most heavily on the Bible. There are also other kinds of evidence and so let me now make some more general observations.

The phenomenon of the theater indicates that we can be absorbed into fictional characters and in that absorption experience the registers of desire more acutely even than in real life. The climax of horror and pity that is the classical catharsis discharges emotions that are both ours and not ours; in the fictional figures we see ourselves more clearly than by romantic introspection, and the most vivid thing we see is how enthralled we are to the desire of the other, in this case the character in the play or movie.  Greek tragedy originated as a religious ritual that facilitated self-cleansing and emotional renewal, and to this day ritual remains the dramatic performance of desire, an exercise in aligning our desires with the god’s and in seeing the world and each other through the divine eyes.

The phenomenon of modern advertising is a commercial exploitation of the originally religious application of theatrical enthrallment. Desire is deployed in the most shameful terms- have you seen those full page ads for cell phones that feature a young woman in postures that direct attention to the genital area while she holds a vaginal-shaped phone? This is not, however, a clear example of mimetic desire because reproduction might be regarded as a natural imperative rather than a desire. More revealing are the ads that show celebrities favoring the product; we are more susceptible to contagion from the desire of a celebrity than of a nobody, but nobodies will do when there is nobody else. 

A pathetic subtext of all this is the deception about the lack of a plenitude of being. I assume that the other has the excess being I need to fill the void in my being; she enjoys plenitude – how popular she is! - and if I could be like her this void in me  would be filled. I don’t have to articulate this to myself in order to be caught in the contagion of fashion, or the personal rivalry of desire. The extreme acting out of this is a certain form of cannibalism, and if I have time I shall describe the politics of mutual consumption in the Liberia of the 90’s during and after a vicious civil war, where politicians hired specialists to assassinate their rivals and bring the heart for them to eat, thus not only eliminating the rival but gaining his power. We of course don’t eat each other literally, but emotionally and spiritually I believe a lot of consumption goes on. (Perhaps this is the real meaning of consumerism?). It is driven by the mimetic nature of desire.

I learned an important form of this cannibalism of being recently from Francine Du Plessis Gray’s new biography of Simone Weil. Weil lived a brief, mystical life during WW2 and influenced Girard. She saw that we have a tendency to spread evil beyond ourselves, relieving, for example, our own suffering by inflicting suffering on others. Thus we try to enhance ourselves comparatively by diminishing the other. Envy thinks it will walk better if the neighbor breaks his leg. The comparative advantage is, however, only  the superficial level. Weil understands this phenomenon of blaming more profoundly, as an active taking of being from the other and not just a comparative advantage. By the scapegoat move I transport the burden of emptiness from myself onto another, and I expect the cavity left behind to fill up miraculously. It fills with the fog of delusion, because only the responsibility I refuse can fill it.

A famous colleague of mine at Stanford, the late Prof Ernst Hilgard, who did pioneering work in the investigation of hypnosis, points out that we are always being entranced by each other. When we listen to the other, or more dangerously, look into her eyes, we are entranced, captivated by her desire, and want what she wants or we try to make her want what we want. Emotional manipulation goes on all the time and it is for the most part automatic. There is a remarkable passage in the gospels where the Herodians and Pharisees say to Jesus, “Teacher, we know that you are true and that you do not care what anyone else thinks, nor do you look into the face of men and women, but teach the way of God in truth “ (Mark 12:14). Puzzling, until we know that face-to-face we enthrall each other, and in Hebrew idiom to “regard the face of” is to favor someone unjustly. It is what bribes are given to purchase, a face to face encounter, and it is why justice is so precious and so scarce, especially for those who do not have entrée and cannot catch the eye or get the ear of the judge. It is the reason why losing face is so destructive, - no one sees us any longer - and why a wink is all that is needed in the mirror world of the lynch mob. We shall return to that mob soon, but in the mean time we might never again say that she is just a pretty face.

Here are some other banal examples: In a bargaining situation never let on that you really want the object; say no several times, walk away. Apparently withdrawing your desire undermines the other persons desire for the object and lessens its value for him; he will drop the price to regain the approval of your desire. In a relationship, don’t be too eager. If your prospect is loosing interest, go out with somebody else; it will make him desire you ardently, not because you have changed but because your value has shot up. The financial markets are networks of desire; Keynes’s famous example was the beauty contest in a local newspaper where you had to judge which of the photos of beautiful women published daily would at the end of the week be chosen by most readers as the most beautiful. So the judgment had little to do with the anything like intrinsic beauty and much to do with mimetic desire. “Which of these photos would most people desire?”  This mimetic contagion is the air inside the bubble of a market. “Everybody wants it, it must be valuable.”  I told you the theory was banal, or rather the evidence for the theory is banal.

There is, however, one story that might not be banal if only because of its religious standing, the story of Adam and Eve and the serpent. God gave them permission to eat of every tree in the garden except one, with the result that the only tree they wanted to eat from was the one forbidden them. Why? Because clearly God desired that tree more than all the other trees together. It is an insult to give someone something you do not want yourself, even if it is a paradise. God’s desire for the tree made it irresistibly desirable, and all the other trees worthless, and instead therefore of remaining obedient creatures Adam and Eve became the rivals of God. They learned desire from God and fell into a violent rivalry with God, which resulted in the crucifixion of God by his human creature rivals. This is serious stuff; it is the essence of the satanic myth, of the highest of the angels who preferred ultimately to rule in hell than to serve in heaven. Satan is the classic symbol of what I have called the generative mimetic scapegoating mechanism (GMSM) the great flesh eater who arises from our own mimetic desire and which we disown by making a myth of it.

One More example: things are going badly inside corporation x, everyone is at loggerheads, verbal and emotional violence is shaking the place apart, the organization is breaking down. They fire the CEO. Suddenly the violence abates and although nothing has changed objectively, everything has changed subjectively and the organization gets a new lease on life. We call this scapegoating, and it is now time to see if we can give a good explanation of these clues, in the sense of showing how they fit together and reveal who committed the crime. Holmes once more, or Agatha Christie. Rene Girard as Hercule Poirot.

I have spent time on these clues in order to establish the point on which the whole theory turns, that desire is helplessly mimetic and mimesis leads to competition at the most intimate level of existence and competition leads to violence of many kinds, not least of which are psychological and social, and not excepting the good old American kind, with fist and gun. If you accept this, stay with me, if you do not I suggest you cut your loss and go home now.

2. The Role of Theory in Interpretation

A French diplomat is reported to have said of a certain policy, “We know that it works in practice, but does it work in theory.” Many French intellectuals of the post WW2 era shared this confidence in the power and necessity of theory, and Girard is one of them. Before they hewed down the branch on which they were sitting in the turn away from historical experience to linguistic structures and then to general incoherence these intellectuals behaved as if the human world were intelligible and that statements could be made that were for the most part reliable descriptions and not only indicators of difference within the language system or idiosyncratic interpretations. So Girard’s mimetic theory is old-fashioned, because it assumes that language refers to items in the world, and that the facts of history and of human behavior, as accessed through great literature and good ethnology, set a limit to interpretation. One cannot, for instance, deny that the Holocaust took place generally as described in our sources, or maintain that the massacre at Mountain Meadows in 1857 did not involve Mormons but only Indians. Interpretation is unavoidable but one conclusion is not as good as another. Some interpretations are ignorant, some careless, some fraudulent, and some true.

I expect you are now ready for a description of the mimetic theory, for a master narrative that will integrate the phenomena we have noted into a satisficing whole, but I am going to postpone this climax a little longer by means of some preliminary thoughts about the general nature of theory. I have called it a master narrative, and how shall we understand that?

Etymology is of dubious value in understanding the use of terms but it can be entertaining. The first meaning of theoreo in Liddell, Scott, Jones’ classical Greek lexicon is to be a theoros, and what is a theoros? A theoros is an ambassador sent by a city-state to consult an oracle, as for example the Pythia of Delphi.  A theoros is also a spectator at festal games. As its meaning develops theoreo indicates a particular way of seeing, namely the way of the spectator, that is, the seeing of the detached and uncommitted, not the participant. This is still the way a theorist works.  Something of the oracular also seems still to cling to the meaning of theoreo because we still seem to claim that detachment will give us a profounder insight into the way things are than participation. It will also predict, an essential test of good science. Like the oracle, theory will tell us what is really going on, bring order to the welter of evidence, and help us predict. Detachment should also enable us to talk of things charged with personal significance without the burden of that significance hampering the freedom of thought. We check our convictions at the door, bracket our prejudices and try simply to see. (That at least is the theory). 

Most agree that the standards by which we judge the quality of a theory are its elegance and its fruitfulness. By elegance I understand the ability to encompass a lot of data in a brief explanation, and by fruitfulness I understand the power to generate questions and thus open up avenues of further research. A theory, therefore, is not the same thing as an hypothesis; it is rather a broader and more encompassing intellectual stance that generates hypotheses.  It has a lot of the intuitive about it. It facilitates the formulation of the right questions – clearly to ask the right question is already to know a lot about the answer. Theory supplies most of the pre-knowledge that efficient questioning requires.

My presentation of mimetic theory takes to form of an account of origins. Such genetic theories are unfashionable for the good reason that there is no necessary link between what happened then and what happens now. Nevertheless, I believe that a plausible genetic account does in many ways unveil the present as well as the past. One does not have to attribute all human characteristics to our genes, but clearly genes play an important part in who we are.

Etymologically, then, we have learned that a theory is a point of view, a position taken for optimal seeing. Another word for theory is speculation, the Latin equivalent that recalls the mirror, or speculum. “Now we see puzzling reflections as in a mirror (1 Cor 13).” Theory, speculation, spectacles, as in “rose-tinted spectacles.” If you put on my mimetic spectacles you will see things you would otherwise not see. You will see that the tent is missing when you rhapsodize about the stars, and that the tent is more important than the stars for understanding your present situation. Theory helps us to see, to ask the right questions, to open up new lines of enquiry, to speak together about important things with more light than heat. No wonder theory is the basis of the university, and I am honored to be here to speculate with you.

3. The Theory Itself:

We turn now at last to what Girard prefers to call the Mimetic theory, and what I have rather pompously called, “the generative, mimetic, scapegoating mechanism” (GMSM). It is primarily a theory of human relations and of their expression as religion, and only secondarily a theory of violence. Violence arises incidentally out of the dynamics of human relations. Religion in this context does not refer to any specific religious group but to a universal anthropological structure centered on human sacrifice. I shall give you the theory in the form of a historical narrative, which is true in the simple sense of being an accurate and reliable account of what happened. I am of course aware of the raft of criticisms that might be off-loaded against such a simple idea of truth these days, but I see no reason to doubt that we can give a satisficing account of what happens. Much of the story is for obvious reasons circumstantial, and allowance must be made for the demands of brevity and continuity, but it is intended to be an account of what happened and not a just-so story.

The governing theme of the story, which we have already canvassed, is that human desire is radically imitative; we learn from the other what to desire, thus come to desire the same thing because the other desires it, and so fall into competition that turns violent. The imitative force of desire in the anthropoid apes became so intense that the hierarchies of submission broke down, and the cohesion of the group was in jeopardy. This intensification of desire might be attributable to the enlarging brain, but the nature of the desire remained structurally constant across the dividing line between ape and hominid. It remained a radically imitative behavior. Give the chimp a banana and the other chimps want to take it from him. Put additional bananas in the cage and they still want the one that the other has. This means that one chimp learns the value of an object from the other, wants what the other wants. In the matter of mating the same mimesis of desire occurs, but it is controlled by a natural hierarchy,  in which the winner takes all and the losers desire from afar.

As the hominids emerge this hierarchy breaks down, because their mimetic desire has greater force and they compete without inhibition and without pause. The hominid group thus falls into a crisis of violent disorder as converging desires lead to violent competition. The violence then takes on a mimetic life of its own as hominids copy not only the initial desires but also the violent desires, not only those that take the form of acquisitiveness but also those that take the form of vengeance. Because desire is contagious violence is like a pandemic.

In this turmoil of violence, the war of all against all, the social system reaches a culminating level of disorder and then spontaneously mutates back to order. It is a self-regulating, self-healing system, so there is no question of anyone deciding to enter into a contract, rather spontaneously the war of all against all becomes the war of all against one, and the broil of universal disorder becomes the band of murderous brothers killing the odd one out. The violence of mimetic desire gone to boundless rivalry brings the social system to a moment of emergence, a self-healing mutation of the system from the war of all against all to the war of all against one with the emergence of the surrogate victim. Thus the foundation of society is not a social contract, nor a natural affinity and mutual attraction, but a swerve in the symmetry of a self-healing system that throws up a victim, whose death in turn stabilizes the system. Society is fundamentally the unity of the lynch mob.

This story of origin is intended to account for the evidence we see around us. We live by victimizing others, expelling, accusing, attacking, and the more insecure and disordered the group feels, the more it is likely to find and attack an external enemy. (This is beautifully portrayed in the “Rite of Spring”(1913) ballet, with music by Stravinsky and choreography by Nijinsky, where the corps dances stompingly until one spins of, and then the group turns on that one individual and kills her. Marvelously appropriate is the fact that rioting broke out after the first performance by patrons who were outraged at its radical newness; I think they were appalled that art had so clearly seen through their bourgeois cover-up. The same implicit choreography occurs in the earliest Greek Tragedies, which were first performed on the feast of Dionysus, the Bouphonia or feast of the goat, when the pharmakos or human scapegoat was humiliated around the town of Athens and then expelled. In the tragedies there was originally only one protagonist and the chorus, the latter standing for the village and giving voice to the mob by dancing, singing and speaking, the former standing for the victim whose expulsion preserves the cohesion of the group). 

The killing of the surrogate victim is the beginning of culture. All society and culture comes out of the victim in the form of ritual, myth and prohibition, thus the first human social order is religion and the first form of human culture is religious. Religion in this sense is the founding moment (the killing of the victim), the enduring structure (ritual beginning with human sacrifice), the interpretative principle (myth) and the ordering imperative (prohibition) of human society and culture. Thus mimetic theory is a religious anthropology in which violence emerges as a central dynamic element.

Culture emerges from the victim through a series of misinterpretations, which have to be decoded if the real history is to be known. Therefore the theory is a theory of interpretation, or a hermeneutical theory in the old theological sense of hermeneutic, before the word was poisoned by Heidegger. The misinterpretation occurs as follows and simply by recounting how it happened we are re-interpreting it.

The mob pauses before the body of the first victim and to its astonishment realizes that it has experienced its first moment of peace and unanimity. Violent desire stops. From this surprised tranquility flow the fatal misinterpretations. The first and fundamental misunderstanding is that the victim was the cause of the violent disorder. If by his death he brings peaceful order, in his life he must have caused the violent disorder. He is, therefore, very powerful; he is a god, the creator of the world, in the sense of the order of culture and society. Here is the origin of the idols, the human sacrifice, the mythology and the taboos that are the default position in human religiosity. 

This misunderstanding unfolds along three lines, all of which are religious. The first is the inference that if one death brought order at last, many deaths would maintain or even increase that order. So the event is ritually institutionalized and the cult of human sacrifice comes into being. Every day a victim is ritually killed to maintain the stability of the polity. We tell ourselves that if we do not provide a daily victim the god will become hungry and bad-tempered and behave erratically. Above everything let’s keep him well fed and assured of our regard. This of course is a lie; the truth is that we are renewing the unanimity of the mob by reenacting the slaughter and revitalizing the bloodlust.

All cultures subsist on human sacrifice, from the civic temples of ancient city states to the ritualized expulsion of the king every four or eight years by the process of elections, which might be seen as the gathering of rival mobs to destroy each others victims. (Remember that “candidate” comes from the Latin for white, which was the color worn in the Roman Forum by those running for office, making themselves stand out from the crowd. In the old days the mob’s spontaneous victims were those who stood out, and we still have a special hatred for those who are different, who stand out either by their excellence or their affliction. There is such a thing as the mark of the victim).

The Nawatl Aztecs were perhaps the least inhibited about human sacrifice in the last two millennia. Fr Bernardino de Sahagun (c.1490-1590; Historia de las cosas de Nueva Espana, 1829. Its publication was delayed because of the opposition of the Holy Inquisition) describes the ritual for the renewal of fire. Periodically all old blankets are burned, all pottery broken and all fires extinguished in the cultural area. A victim is killed atop the pyramid by having the chest cavity cut open and the heart ripped out. Then a bowl of tinder is placed in the cavity and fire generated there by rubbing sticks. When the fresh flame kindles in the chest of the victim the first of the new fire lights a torch and then is passed from torch to torch throughout the community. There could be no clearer ritual re-enactment of the mimetic theory that culture comes from the victim, and that human sacrifice is the ritual of creation and re-creation.

A second line of development is what I like to call “myth-understanding,” because it generates the mythology of creation in the form of stories of origins that occlude the primal murder and present the dying creator as either the victim of an accident, or a mysterious tragic destiny, or willing, or deserving of death. Myth never discloses that he died by the hand of the mob and that his death is a disclosure of your violence and mine in and through the mob. We hold our mob innocent and non-violent and transfer all responsibility for violence to the victim. He deserved it, invited it, or it was an accident; we are not to blame.  Culture comes into being as a cover-up of our own violence.

Thirdly, we consolidate this blaming of the victim by the promulgation of prohibitions or taboos, as follows: We remember that the mimetic behavior which resulted in the erasure of differences caused the violence of unbridled competition, therefore we avoid behavior that threatens to erase distinctions. So for instance we do not marry our siblings; they are too much like us. There is a New Guinea tribe that has been recorded as saying of a rival tribe, “Oh yes, they are our enemies, we marry them!”  Thus taboos come into being, but their pragmatic origins are occluded. They are presented as commands of the god. We say, “If we do such and such the god will be angry and to punish us will cause violence to break out among us,” instead of saying, “We must avoid situations that exacerbate our mimetic propensity and make the differences as wide and clear as possible. Don’t marry your siblings! “

These are the three easily discernible products of the event of the killing of the victim. There is a more general product that is more difficult to discern but is perhaps the most important of all, namely representation. That primal mob, in its moment of surprising peace somehow concludes that the victim stands for them, the one for the many, a part for the whole. It is a short way from there to the idea that he died instead of us, and that he bears the punishment that I should have borne. This is the moment of the birth of the scapegoat, and it is closely bound up with the first outcome above, the ritual of sacrifice. If the victim bears my sins I need to kill one every day; when my anxiety reaches an unbearable intensity, when the organization turns fatally dysfunctional, I can lay the negativity on the scapegoat and thus drive it away. The goat and I are the same and yet different, because he is the same he can represent me, because he is different he can only re-present, and not present, me. Thus I and the mob have a way of letting violence out of the group and ourselves, on the back of the scapegoat. Every time we lay the blame on someone and thus drive him out we make a human sacrifice and exonerate ourselves.

I must stop there. I am overwhelmed with the weight of what I have not said. You might by now have intuited that this theory is an account of everything. It has been criticized precisely for this apparent omni competence; so be it. I prefer a theory that unveils a panorama to a bag of untitled snapshots. Let me close with a note on my own religion, Christianity. I believe it is a faith rather than a religion in the pagan sense I have been describing, but I confess it has been full of paganism for all its history. We Protestant Christians in our better moments protest against the pagan religiosity of Christianity, and so do the Catholic and Orthodox. What form does this protest take? The crucified victim at the center of our symbology discloses the lamb slain as the foundation of the world, the victim from whom all culture comes as Bernardino de Sahagun describes. Thus we acknowledge rather than cover-up the truth that the world rests on the bodies of its victims, that they must die so that we can live, thus we rectify the myth-interpretations of default human paganism. Simply by telling the true story, that the victim did not die by accident, or deservedly or willingly, but was simply murdered, in this case by the state, we give the true interpretation of the mendacity of myth.  And when we accept those rules and regulations not as divine threats but as human conveniences, we can love God again as the nurturing rather than the punishing Father. So what shall we do? Confess that we are the murderers of our brothers and sisters, repent, and stop it. Jesus is the last and sufficient sacrifice! There on the Cross all the rage, violence and hatred of god the flesh eater, broke against God the life giver, and He absorbed it without retaliation, taking it in and taking it away. No more killing, even if we call it sacrifice!

The most ironic twist of the knife is to blame the Jews or the Romans for this murder of God, some one else, at some other time. That dirty act of scapegoating is simply fatal, the password to hell, because it commits against the Christ the very crime he dies to expiate. The only true response is, “It is I!  And I will never do such a thing again, so help me God!”