Tag Archives: René Girard

Quixotic Reading

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Don_Quijote_and_Sancho_PanzaIt is both interesting and significant that the mimetic desire revealed in two of the novels discussed by René Girard in Deceit, Desire & the Novel are derived, not from other people, but from characters in literature.

Don Quixote famously went mad with a desire to imitate Amadis of Gaul in the medieval romances of this knight errant, while Madame Bovary’s desires were fueled by the sentimental novels she read. The literature consumed by both characters gives them distorted visions of reality. Don Quixote mistakes windmills for evil giants and a barber’s basin for a knight’s helmet. Madame Bovary sees the lovers of her life through the lens of the romance novels and fails to see them as they really are until it is too late.

Of the two, Don Quixote is much more removed from “reality” than Madame Bovary. Yet, although the novels Madame Bovary has read seem to mirror “real life” and are thus “realistic,” it is she who seems to be even more confused about “reality” than Don Quixote, to the point of being smothered by fantasy so that what self she has disappears. C.S. Lewis offers us a key insight here when he says : “Children are not deceived by fairy tales; they are often and gravely confused by school stories. Adults are not deceived by science fiction; they can be deceived by the stories in the women’s magazines.” Lewis seems a bit sexist here but the underlying point is clear enough. “Realistic” stories present models and stir up desires that seem realistic but are traps that catch the unwary reader.

Curiously, Don Quixote’s fantasies have a contagion of their own. An unnamed man accuses Don Quixote of having a “talent for making anyone who has anything to do with you mad and senseless.” It is curious that Don Quixote is blamed for the insanity of others, as the other people are arguably making themselves insane by staying on Quixote’s case to the point of obsession. In the second part of the novel, a duke and duchess spend huge amounts of time and expense to mirror Don Quixote’s desires in theatrical fakery. They themselves seem to be caught up in Quixote’s madness as much as their victim.

In both cases, there is something of a collective violence around a victim. In the case of Don Quixote, his singularity provokes a spontaneous, improvised conspiracy to bring him to his senses. In the case of Madame Bovary, the social system of mimetic desire is fully developed to the extent that both Madame Bovary and her irresponsible husband and lovers all act like puppets of the ambient fantasy fueled by the novels and the culture industry.

Novelists such as Cervantes and Flaubert are faced with the enormous challenge of revealing the truth of mimetic desire in a medium that is normally used to reflect and fuel mimetic desire. After all, it is the latter tendency that makes huge profits for the producers of this and other media. In the second part of Don Quixote Cervantes does not disguise his indignation over copycat offshoots of his work and other ersatz imitators. Perhaps the main thrust of the second part was to mirror the misunderstandings of his readers in the Duke and the Duchess.

It isn’t enough to write novels revealing mimetic desire. Also needed are readers who can truly see what these novels reveal. If Cervantes was exasperated by the readers of his time, imagine his apoplexy over a musical featuring an inspirational song about following impossible dreams. For Cervantes was showing us in his novels that successfully imitating fictional characters is truly impossible. Don Quixote could not live Amadis of Gaul’s life any more than Emma Bovary could live the lives of heroines in the novels she read. They could only live their own lives, which they failed to do.

Werther is another fictional person who was widely imitated for a time. Heartsick and overwhelmed by his mimetic desire for a woman already promised to another man, Werther kills himself. The publication of Goethe’s novella was followed by an epidemic of suicides throughout Europe. This phenomenon is still called the Werther effect. Drowning in the mimetic desire of fictional characters can be deadly.

So how do we read in a way that is life giving? The short answer is to seek life where it can be found, where Don Quixote found it at the end, in repentance. I will give a slightly longer answer in my next blog post.

Human Weakness the Cornerstone

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peter healing cripple_RembrandtThese days we take ramps and handicapped parking spaces for granted. However, such considerations for people with special needs are quite a flip-flop from what such people experienced in the early days of humanity. In the social crises at the dawn of humanity as envisioned by René Girard, when everybody was at everybody’s throat, the choice of the victim was usually arbitrary, almost like a lottery. It could be anyone. However, if any person in this melee of undifferentiation should stand out in any way, that person would be the most likely victim. The person who stood out might be the most talented; a scenario often repeated today. (See Ignominious Glory, Glorious Ignominy: A Doxology) Many mythological victim/deities were great musicians or poets. Another way a person might stand out is by being handicapped. René Girard points out that a predatory animal will spot the weakest member of a herd and go for that one and that the same holds true of a society in crisis. One need only think of the many lame victims such as Oedipus or deities like Odin with only one eye.

The flip-flop started as soon as the Church, inspired by Jesus’ healing ministry, had the resources to build facilities for the sick and disable. As far as I can tell, hospitals are a Christian invention. We are so used to infirmaries that we think nothing of Benedict’s provision for an infirmary in his Rule, but Benedict was an innovator in his time. The teaching and ministry of Jesus that involved reaching out to the weak, the people formerly rejected by society, had become the cornerstone of Benedict’s monastic vision that consideration should always be shown to the weak. Of course, Benedict meant far more than sick and handicapped people with this admonition, as Benedict well knew that we all experience weakness in many ways. I have discussed care of the sick and its ramifications at length in my book Tools for Peace.

Many years ago, when I was a seminarian taking CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education), one of the chaplains, who was legally blind, gave a talk on issues involving handicaps. He helped us greatly in sensitizing us to how people in his position felt with being helped either too much or not enough. He was also very honest about himself and he admitted that being handicapped did not necessarily make him any more sensitive to other handicapped people than anybody else. As an example, he told us of how he recoiled when introduced to a person with a withered arm.

To this day, even those of us who care for others experience this kind of recoil when we encounter others who are a bit different, especially if the difference is grotesque. But our treatment of alleged nerds and celebrities shows us that a difference in conspicuous talent raises the same sort of dread. If we notice ourselves in this respect, we can experience a kinship with our brothers and sisters who made sacrificial victims and then deities out of the likes of Odin.

Respecting All Things that God has Made

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buddingTree1The Book of Common Prayer gives us an important focus for Lent by starting the collect for the Ash Wednesday Eucharist with “Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made and forgive the sins of those who are penitent.” So often, we blame the material world for our sins and then hate what God has made which God also loves. In a sense, the material world becomes a scapegoat for our own disordered desires. If we eat too much, it isn’t really the fault of the food, though we quickly blame it for our own lack of self-control. Women, of course, have been blamed for being “tempting” as if it is their responsibility to control the desires of men while men need take no responsibility for themselves.

To complicate the picture, René Girard has demonstrated many times in his books that our desires are intertwined with the desires of others in a dense network of mutual imitation. If we become ensnared in desires for certain things or certain people because others desire them, we are in a frustrating situation and, again, it becomes convenient to blame the other people and other things for the pickle we are in.

We need to remember that God is our model for perfect love for all that God has made. That means that, unlike Zeus and many other mythological deities, God does not lust after humans but loves all humans with perfect respect. The more we respect other people and all things in the world, the more restraint we have in relation to them. So it is that when we repent and turn to God, we also turn to all things and to all people that God has made with new respect and love.

Sacrificing the Aztecs

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Teotihuacan9The sacrificial rites of the Aztecs at the time of their conquest give a rich example of the institutionalizing of sacrifice. The horrific quantity of children sacrificed to bring on rain with their tears, and the men whose hearts were cut out to keep the sun alive leads us to dismiss them as civilized human beings. But they were highly civilized. In the book Sacrifice and Modern thought, two stimulating articles help us understand Aztec sacrifice. Both Laura Rival and David Brown help us sympathize with the Aztecs as human beings. Rival points out that human sacrifice was modeled on the deities who threw themselves into the primordial fire to create the fifth sun and set it in motion. This myth points to a noble disposition behind the sacrifice. It is not hard, however, to see this as a typical myth that hides the collective violence that laid the foundations of their culture.

David Brown summarizes clearly the “flower wars” that were part of the sacrificial system. These wars had become as highly ritualized as the sacrifices performed on the top of the pyramids. The whole purpose of these wars was to capture sacrificial victims in fair fights. The initial chaos leading to the myths and sacrificial rites had led to a complex, highly restrained structure of warfare.

Brown quotes a moving statement by an Aztec leader who says that the Spaniards did not understand “how vital it is for us to give blood to the gods.” As selfless as the sacrifices were, and the Aztecs believed they were rewarded in the afterlife, they were convinced that if they failed to continue these sacrifices, the gods would become angry and turn away from them. Here we have it: as with so many other early cultures, the Aztecs were caught in a sacrificial system that allowed no escape. If the gods are subject to anger and capriciousness, one does not dare turn away from the only rites that had a chance of deflecting the divine wrath.

The structure and restraint of the Aztecs is a dramatic contrast to the chaotic overrunning of their country on the part of the Spanish Conquistadors. Cortes justified these measures out of repulsion at the sacrifices carried out by the conquered people, but in a cruel irony, the Spanish made a cruel holocaust of the sacrificers. A comparison with the lynching of blacks in the United States shows us the same chaotic mob violence. (See Selling Postcards of the Cross.) In The One by Whom Scandal Comes, René Girard contrasts the fundamental way Satan works in archaic cultures and in modern cultures where some awareness of the Gospel has occurred. Among the Aztecs, as with so many other peoples, Satan was the transcendent principal of order. But with Satan cast out of the sky during the ministry of the Hebrew prophet Jesus, Satan acts imminently within human cultures as a disrupter.

In my last post, I noted how killing twins became part of a package of maintaining a satanic social order. (See Twin Killings.) All twins can be thankful that this order has been dismantled. Likewise, we can be grateful that we don’t have pyramids where people’s hearts are torn out. We are free of the satanic order, but we are not free of the chaotic violence that has been unleashed on to the world unless we actively seek the freedom we gain from being grounded in the God of Love who has gathered all Aztec victims into the divine fire that fills us all with eternal life.

Twin Killings

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220px-Rubens_Reconciliation_of_Jacob_and_EsauIn baseball a twin killing is a double play: two outs on one batted ball. “Two for the price of one,” as the great Detroit Tigers great sportscaster Ernie Harwell called it. Double plays are a legitimate part of baseball. But there is another kind of twin killing that has been a part of humanity until close to the present day that is not legitimate: the killing of twins.

Why was one, and sometimes, both twins been killed in early societies? René Girard suggests that it was the fear of what he called “mimetic doubles,” two people united through conflict. After the social chaos was resolved by collective violence, societies created structures to prevent the repeat of the chaos as much as possible. Twins, especially identical twins, were too much of an image of the indifferentiation that lead to conflict. They could not be allowed to live. During the time of chaos, indifferentiation was precisely the problem as differences between people melted in the heat of conflict. It is obvious to us now that these babies were innocent victims of society’s fear of mimetic doubles, but in today’s society where social differences are dissolving, perhaps we should fear, not twin babies, but mimetic doubles.

The authors of Genesis had no illusions about the danger of mimetic doubles. Brothers paired off against each other are the driving force of the book, culminating in Joseph’s brothers ganging up on him. Jacob and Esau were twins. The conflict that kept them apart for many years finally resolved in an uneasy reconciliation as Esau turned out to be more forgiving for the wrongs done him than Jacob ever believed possible.

Lois Lowry’s chilling dystopia The Giver also has a twin killing. The society is shown to be peaceful but colorless. (Literally so, as we learn when the protagonist, Matthew, begins to see colors.) It becomes apparent that everything is designed to prevent conflict. There is no courtship or sex; medication stifles the latter and babies are grown in test tubes, implanted in adolescent girls, and distributed to couples, each of whom gets one boy and one girl. Not surprisingly, the cost of this “peaceful” society is high. When Matthew is apprenticed to the Giver, he learns that it is his job to keep track of everything that is happening via TV monitors but to do nothing unless asked, as the job is consultative only. A day or two before Matthew makes his escape, he watches his own father “release” one of two twin babies with a lethal injection, the normal way of releasing somebody. (The elderly are so released at a certain age after a celebration of their lives.)

Much else is shown to be wrong with this society but the killing of a twin shows clearly enough that preserving the peace by squelching mimetic doubles inevitably institutionalizes violence, even if, as in Lowry’s society, it is kept invisible. René Girard would argue that one of many effects of the Cross and Resurrection is that we don’t kill twins and we have the freedom to build God’s kingdom where we actualize the freedom shown by Esau to forgive and then later by Joseph to his brothers. It is no longer possible for social structures to contain the potential violence of mimetic doubles in conflict. It is possible, and in our times, necessary to renounce conflict, even if it means forgiving the theft of a blessing. This renunciation leads to its own blessings. After all, Esau had done pretty well for himself while Jacob was away.

Principalities and Powers

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WilliamGuestsChurch1Jesus was not crucified by just one person; he was crucified by a social system. The Gospels and the apostolic preaching in Acts show clearly how hostile social systems in Jerusalem came together to create a larger social system that was united solely by the agreement to put Jesus to death. By quoting from the persecution psalms, these sources suggest that persecutory social systems have always been a part of humanity. René Girard has demonstrated how mythology covers up and yet still points to this same persecutory mechanism. It is such social systems that Paul calls the “principalities and powers” of the world. These principalities get their power from the collective cohesiveness of persecution. This collective power is overwhelming to the individual within this system. Hence the transcendent power they have for Paul. However, Paul also says that the principalities and powers have been dismantled and nailed to the cross by Jesus. The forgiving victim is gathering a radically different social system that not only does not require the sacrifice of the victim but totally precludes such a thing. Paul says that if the principalities and powers had known, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory. Because they did, we have some ability, by the grace of God, for seeing the fundamental signs of a society that is still run, at least in part, by the principalities and powers and for seeing what are the signs of the Kingdom that the Risen and Forgiving Victim has opened up for us.

A society run by the principalities and powers is punitive. Some people may think that is a good thing, but in  a punitive society, somebody must be to blame whenever anything goes wrong or even seems to go wrong. That is, somebody must be punished. When a society needs to have somebody punished, then this need takes precedence over justice. It is better for an innocent person to suffer than for the corporate rage of the society to suffer for lack of an object of that rage.  It follows that the Law of Tit for Tat reigns. There is no room for mercy. Every offense must be met in equal measure. As long as this Law reigns, there is no end in sight to the spiral of retaliation. In Jesus’ Kingdom, restoration of relationships is the corporate desire when things go wrong. The pain of this restoration might feel like punishment for some, but the pain is remedial, moving toward reconciliation.

In the society of the Principalities and Powers, somebody is always expendable. Caiaphas’ dictum that it is better that one person die than that the whole nation should perish is “gospel.” Collateral damage is an acceptable price to pay for objectives deemed good to those who are running the show. Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep that the shepherd seeks until he finds it and brings it back to the fold shows that in Jesus’ Kingdom, nobody is expendable.

The society of the Principalities and Powers is dualistic.  There has to be an “in” group and an “out” group. The society’s identity is based on what is wrong with those people, the enemy.  If we are to love our enemies, as Jesus teaches, then enemies do not define us in any way.

Most devastating of all, the society of the Principalities and Powers is mendacious. The need to cover up the truth of collective violence in primitive societies carries over to the most sophisticated of modern societies. Part of this mendacity is to blame the victim. The blame that many US politicians cast on women who are raped is a particularly grisly example. Victims of lynching, too, were blamed for what happened to them.

Here is the choice. Where is our treasure? Where is our heart?

Myth Become Fact

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crosswButterfliesOne of the more memorable phrases culled from C.S. Lewis is Christ is “myth made fact.” The notion kind of sneaked up on Lewis during the process that lead to his conversion to Christianity.  An offhand remark by his friend T.D. Weldon, a fellow Oxford don and, like Lewis at the time an avowed atheist, made a deep impression on him over the years: “Rum thing, that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. It almost looks as if it really happened once.” Of course, that is precisely the claim of the Gospels.

Lewis’ insight is worth comparing with René Girard’s view of Jesus in relation to mythology. Girard, of course, also studied Frazer’s writings about deities, mainly vegetative deities, dying and rising. Frazer, seems to have absorbed Jesus into the other myths, blurring the distinction between them. Girard, on the other hand, believes that both the myths and the Gospel accounts refer to real events. Here, he also differs from Lewis who seems to have thought of myths as something like cosmic poetry, dealing with timeless truths, such as the vegetative cycle in temperate climates where nature, like Persephone, dies and then rises again. For Girard, all myths, in their origins, are made fact.

Girard’s thesis of sacred violence asserts that social tensions in early societies were resolved, if they were resolved at all, by collective violence that was very real. Mythology then became something of a cover up of this event while still alluding to it. The rising from the dead in such mythology would be the deification of the victim who, in retrospect, was seen as the solution for the problem for which the victim was earlier blamed. Tying such mythology into the vegetative cycle raises suspicions for me that this development, if it did not originate in agricultural societies, was greatly furthered within them. After all, the claiming of land by a tribe would easily inspire other people to desire that land. In such a setting, social tensions leading to the victimage mechanism would happen much quicker than in hunter/gatherer societies. Girard’s thesis also suggests that the real cycle is not in nature but in human activity. That is, an act of collective violence holds a society together for only so long before it needs to happen again. The mythological cycle, then, is a vicious cycle.

For Girard, then, the Gospel narrative of Jesus dying and rising is not the historicization of a timeless truth, but an instantiation of a scenario that had been happening in reality, in time, since the dawn of humanity. What’s new about the Gospels is that the story is told straight out and the victim is claimed to be innocent and was unjustly murdered. For Girard, it isn’t so much a case of myth become fact as the truth behind myth revealed.

As a Christian, Lewis retained sympathy for the myths of dying and rising deities, regarding them as great poetry. Girard, of course, is not so affirming of mythology, as he sees it as obscuring the truth. However, Girard’s point of view does not necessarily mean that myths are bad poetry. Moral goodness and ascetic goodness are not equivalent, after all.

There is a deeper reason though for being open to Lewis’ sympathy. It was the pathos of a deity like Balder who was killed through collective violence that moved Lewis, and it was the same sensitivity that should make the passion of Jesus deeply moving as well. (Interestingly, Lewis went through a period where the dying pagan deities moved him more than the story of Christ; perhaps a residue of his resistance to conversion.) Although a myth such as that of Tiamat, who was blamed for Babylon’s primordial chaos and torn to pieces, does not try to inspire sympathy for a victim the way the Psalms of Lament do, we can see a woman victimized by the people who made a strenuous effort to avoid seeing what they were doing.

There is a deeper reason for sympathy for myth. Deplorable as the countless acts of collective violence were and continue to be, Girard’s thesis also demonstrates how profoundly people were caught up in this mechanism so that they could not escape without intervention from God. It is precisely this intervention from God to free humans in bondage that Paul celebrates time and again in his epistles. If we need this intervention from God in Christ, then we are hardly in a position to be judgmental against the first humans that fell into the same traps we do.

I Me Me Mine

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abyssEach of us knows what my own self is, right? Yeah, my self is right here, right inside of me, running my life. My self is who I am. What could be more obvious? “Everyone’s weaving it, coming on strong all the time!” Hmm. Who is doing the driving, who the weaving. “I-me-me-mine” is doing it according to George Harrison put it? So where is my self in all this?

If René Girard is right, then the human self is not in the midst of our desires, I-me-me-mine, where we tend to locate it. Rather, we derive our desires from the desires of other people and they from us. (See Mimetic Desire and Mimetic Rivalry) Well, we don’t want other people driving our desires or snatching ours away, so we fight back, insisting that I-me-me-mine is the one who wants whatever it is and others are copying I-me-me-mine. The problem is, the whatever-it-is falls away as a desire defining the self and the entire self of I-me-me-mine is embroiled with this rival. Some autonomy. So, I-me-me-mine will try refusing to desire what anybody else desires. This is resentment. Of course, resentment I-me-me-mine me into the enemy’s desire since opposition to a desire is as strong a driving motor as combat over the desire. (See Resentment)

This spiral of desire tilts I-me-me-mine to the abyss that shows this desiring self to be an illusion, a void. While reflecting on Chuang Tzu’s Taoist writings, Thomas Merton suggested that “it is the void that is our personality, and not our individuality that seems to be concrete and defined by present and past, etc.” This “not-I” is seen by Chuang Tzu and Thomas Merton as a source of freedom, but “we are completely enslaved by the illusory.” (Merton & the Tao)

In New Seeds of Contemplation Merton warns us that “every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the man I want myself to be who cannot exist, who cannot exist because God cannot know anything about him.” The false self a.k.a. I-me-me-mine, is constantly in rivalry with other false selves who have the same alias. “All through the night, all through the day, everyone’s saying it, flowing more freely than wine.” Like Merton, George Harrison warns us that an epidemic of desire threatens to flood the whole world.

We aren’t lost in this abyss of “not-I.” If we let go of the matrix of desires that I-me-me-mine clings to, than we find ourselves called by name. This calling voice asks us why we are persecuting him? Persecuting? We weren’t doing nuthin’. I-me-me-mine’s desire machine blinds us to what we are doing to other people, all of whom Christ identifies with.

When we answer with our names to the voice in the abyss, the self is still not-I, but that does not matter because the Persons of the Trinity are filling this void with their forgiving love that clarifies what all this forgiveness is about.

Well, Jesus did say something about dying in order to live.

Baptism: Overwhelmed by Christ’s Love (2)

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lakeGray1Two dramatic events from the Hebrew Bible have been interpreted as prefiguring baptism are the Flood and the deliverance at the Red Sea. Both are deliverances from highly dysfunctional societies.

Genesis 6 portrays human society as consumed with violence. No wonder if everybody was like Lamech and inflicting seventy-seven-fold vengeance on anybody whom he thought had wronged him. In his second epistle, believed by many scholars to be a baptismal homily, Peter says that the deliverance of Noah and his family corresponds to baptism which saves us now through the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. (1 Pet. 3:21) René Girard has suggested that a flood is an apt image for a society overwhelmed with retaliatory violence. In such a scenario, a man who tried not to be a part of this violence would be an obvious choice of a victim to unite the fragmented society. The Christological interpretation in Peter’s epistle suggests by being baptized into Christ’s death, we are brought out of society consumed with violence and given the chance to begin life anew, the chance that Noah and his family had after the flood waters receded. It is worth noting that when referring to Jesus descending into hell (Sheol), Peter does not say Jesus just brought out righteous people like Abraham but that he preached to the very people who had brought humankind to the boiling point while Noah was building his ark.

St. Paul says that we all “passed through the sea and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and the sea.” (1 Cor. 10:2) Once again we have an overwhelming flood. Moreover, we have a story of a people delivered from a violent and oppressive society. In his book Jesus: the forgiving Victim, James Alison suggests that the Jews were expelled after being blamed for the plagues scourging the country. If the Jews were expelled, why would the Egyptians runs after them to bring them back? Perhaps they realized they would implode without the victims who were deemed responsible for their turmoil. This is what seems to have happened with the Gerasenes when their demoniac was cured by Jesus. One could take the tug-of-war between Moses and Pharaoh as indicating this same tension. (See Dispossessing a Town Possessed) Being overwhelmed by the waters is, again, an apt image of a society succumbing to its own violence once the scapegoats are gone.

Unfortunately, neither new chance at a new life went well. Noah’s drunkenness and rivalry among the brothers that made Ham a scapegoat set humanity on a course where the curse laid on him was used to justify slavery and lynching. The people delivered at the Red Sea suffered from chronic social unrest, leading to Moses raising the bronze serpent in the desert to stop the plague of violence. Likewise, the church continues to fall back into the same rivalry and persecution. Most lynchers, unfortunately, were Christians. A tendency to see baptism as deliverance from personal sin surely reinforces such backsliding. Baptism is not a magical deliverance from personal sin but is a constant invitation to be reborn into the new social life of God’s kingdom centered on the forgiving victim who, like the bronze serpent, was raised up to draw all people to himself.

Baptism: Overwhelmed by Christ’s Love (3)

Baptism: Overwhelmed by Christ’s Love (1)

Mimetic Desire and Truth (4)

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crucifix1In my last post in this series, I noted that mimetic rivalry inevitably distorts truth and that it creates victims. The mutual involvement of rivals with each other precludes their seeing each other truly and it makes them oblivious to the people who are affected by their rivalry. René Girard has demonstrated about as well as it is possible when examining the human behavior at the dawn of civilization that social meltdowns were resolved by collective violence that were covered up by myths that obscured the reality of what had happened. When Jesus said that the devil is a murderer and a liar from the beginning (John 8:44) he was not talking about a supernatural figure who was doing the damage; he was making an anthropological statement about human responsibility. That is, the violence of mimetic rivalry inexorably leads to mendacity. Philosophers might quibble with each other about where the limitations of the human intellect are for perceiving truth, but the real problem with perceiving the truth is rooted in the human will. The more involved we are in mimetic rivalry, the less truth we can see.

These considerations lead to the conclusion that truth is found, not in some fancy theory of human knowledge, but in the reality of the victim. It is this reality that is revealed in the numerous psalms of lament where the psalmist is constantly surrounded by enemies who blame him or her for all of the calamities inflicted upon the people. This truth is definitively revealed in the Passion narratives of the Gospels where Jesus is revealed as the innocent and forgiving victim vindicated by God. Andrew McKenna called it “the epistemological privilege of the victim.” Some privilege! James Alison coined the term “the intelligence of the victim.” René Girard consistently deflects postmodernists who insist there is no center of truth anymore by pointing to the reality of the victim as the starting point for perceiving truth.

This sounds simple but mimetic rivalry has twisted this truth in some subtle ways. In a way, the Gospels did the job of revealing the truth of the victim too well. As far as I can tell, nobody, not even Socrates, cared to be in the place of the victim before the Gospels were written. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the most intense mimetic rivalry is precisely over who is the greatest victim. Everybody, every social group wants to be the most victimized victim and to hold that position at the expense of all other victims. CEO’s who rake in millions of dollars in bonuses while they ruin the finances of thousands of people claim to be victims when they become objects of opprobrium. Well, objects of opprobrium are victims, but they don’t know what they are doing. In every conflict between social groups or between individuals, each side, each person is very much aware of the truth of their own victimhood. What none of these people see at all is the truth of the victimhood of their enemies. Least of all do rivals over victimhood see the victims that their rivalry is creating.

The key to truth, then, has become violently distorted in our time. Fortunately, there is more to this key than what we humans have done to it and we will revisit this key in the final post of this series.

Continue on to Mimetic Desire and Truth (5)

See Mimetic Desire and Truth Series

See Mimetic Desire and Mimetic Rivalry for all articles on this subject