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When These Things Begin
By René Girard, Trevor Cribben Merrill Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2014 Michigan State University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-110-5
CHAPTER 1
A First Overview: Here and Now
MICHEL TREGUER: René, even though it may not be a very logical starting point, before laying out your thought in a more organized way, I would like to begin here and now, in the present moment in which our lives are immersed, and which, for some time now, we have seen unfurling before our eyes like a film in fast-forward. I want to do this in order to give the reader a glimpse of the immense range of applications and the tremendous interpretive power of your theory, and in order to familiarize the reader with the language we'll be speaking. Which in turn leads me to sum up in a few sentences the essential tenets of your thesis. You can correct me as we go along!
Every human group is subject to mechanisms of what you call mimetic desire, of imitation and reciprocal jealousy, which are ineluctable sources of violence. We each desire what others desire, and then imitate their way of desiring, and so forth. From time to time, in a more or less cyclical way, the fever of this inexorable competition culminates in a crisis that threatens the group's cohesion. This observation, which might seem merely anecdotal at first glance, is in truth the foundation of an extraordinarily powerful and far-reaching explanatory principle that makes it possible to shed light on nearly all individual and collective behavior, from domestic squabbles to large-scale historical phenomena, from the dawn of humanity to the current era.
The first societies resolved these recurrent "mimetic crises" by imputing to a victim—a scapegoat—the sins of the group and sacrificing it. Then, gradually, simulacra replaced the real murders: thus were born the rites of the primitive pagan religions, as well as the myths assigned the task of legitimizing them by linking them to the sacred horror of the group's origins. In other words, all human cultures are founded on murder. The initiation of children cemented these closed systems and perpetuated the power of the adults.
You think the Christian message, as it appears in the Gospels, marks an absolute break with these "eternal returns," the true beginning of a true humanity. Jesus is the first and the only one to say of myths and rituals: "These are lies, the victims were innocent. Stop envying and opposing one another, because that's the source of all evil. Love one another. Children of all nations, emancipate yourselves: your fathers are liars." In saying this, of course, he proclaims the existence of human rights, which we still hear about from time to time today, and which are thus essentially "the rights of the victims to ask for reparations from their persecutors." How does that sound to you?
RENÉ GIRARD: Fine, except when you say "your fathers are liars." Christ wouldn't have spoken like that. The rather facile condemnation of fathers was already widespread in his time, and he denounced it. He corrected the Pharisees, who said: "If we had lived at the time of our fathers, we would not have joined them in killing the prophets." The ones who talk like that are the most likely to get caught up in future mimetic escalations. The feeling of superiority they experience with respect to the past is itself a form of mimetic violence very similar to the one they think they've left behind them.
I'd like to draw particular attention to the fact that the crystallization of the group's tensions at the expense of a victim is an unconscious process. The best proof of this is that if you asked everyone today, all over France: "Do the people around you take out their frustrations on scapegoats?" everyone would answer in the affirmative; but if you then asked the same people: "And do you have scapegoats?" everyone would answer in the negative. To become Christian is, fundamentally, to perceive that it isn't just others who have scapegoats. And note that the two greatest Christians, the founders of the Church, Peter and Paul, were two converted persecutors. Before their conversion, they, too, thought that they didn't have any scapegoats.
Another point. Rituals aren't only, as is sometimes said, mere pantomimes of reconciliation, a sort of harmless "happening" by which the group's members give recognition to one another and strengthen their feelings of belonging. We're talking about human culture at its strongest and most powerful. Christianity teaches us that this essential mechanism of the human condition is based on a lie, but a kind of lie that is ungraspable because of what philosophers call "the closure of representation." Each of us lives in a cultural system like a fish in a bowl. The system is closed. It is always closed, in a certain sense, by victims.
MT: Stop! Don't give too many details! We'll come back to all of these points, but it seems to me that the first thing to do is to give a broad overview of your ideas. Let me therefore add some additional remarks to my introduction, for the life and death of Christ prove insufficient to tear humanity abruptly away from the reign of hatred and lies.
On the one hand, historical Christianity ends up erring by making a "sacrificial reading" of Christ's death. Actually, you say—and even if he was treated as a scapegoat—Christ didn't die guilty like the victims (often divinized later on) of all mythical narratives, taking upon himself all of the sins of human beings, which in the end only gave them a temporary reprieve—to the contrary he was innocent, telling people, "From now on, live and die according to my example, without making victims, and defending victims." It is in this error that we should seek the explanation for the violence with which Christian history is tainted.
On the other hand, and more generally speaking, the revelation of this truth is a slow process that, even as it gradually eradicates these violent mechanisms, reproduces and exaggerates them along the way in all sorts of monstrous ways.
And all of this, which is already a bit complicated, brings me to my first question, which is quite simple: do you see in the recent, incredible liberation of the Eastern European countries, in an incredibly short time, the fulfillment of the promise contained in the Gospels? Are these events just another incident in twentieth century history or do they have meaning on a millennial scale?
RG: The summary that you've given of my thesis isn't, or rather is no longer, accurate. I don't say that historical Christianity is wrong. The Church does not betray the Gospels by using the word sacrifice as it does. It uses it in a sense that comes from the depths of the past, of course, but that has been renewed by what Christ does, and I don't question its legitimacy. It is the most profound meaning, the most encompassing.
In my approach there aren't the sort of radical breaks with tradition that my language has sometimes suggested. But I think we'll come back to this. As far as Marxism goes, my answer is obviously affirmative. In my view, Marxism truly does function by means of mechanisms of the "scapegoat" variety, naturally with some refinements with respect to the originary process: the victims are deliberately chosen according to a theory.
MT: The scapegoat is the bourgeoisie!
RG: Yes and no. The emergence of systems of this kind is an accident with a high probability of occurrence in the Christian world. As the truth about the mechanisms of violence gradually comes to light, secondary processes that circumvent and reduplicate them tend to arise. Marxism and Nazism are examples of such processes. From my point of view, the collapse of Marxism is the collapse of a quasi-mythical system of persecution: it is in conformity with what I see as the normal, long-term evolution of our world.
Under Stalin, the scapegoat system snowballed so much that it brings to mind a primitive society gone mad. In The Gulag Archipelago, for example, Solzhenitsyn recounts that the presence of a suspect in a Moscow apartment building sometimes entailed the arrest of all its occupants and sometimes of everyone living on the street. This is a little like those societies who see the birth of twins as a manifestation of violence that is contagious because it is mimetic. The members of those societies think quite "logically" that the mother must have violated some taboo, that she probably committed adultery. Sometimes the fear of violence is such that suspicion is cast on the entire family and spreads to the neighbors and everyone in the vicinity. Instead of sending everyone to the gulag, ritual purifications are carried out, which is certainly preferable. Stalinism also makes one think, mutatis mutandis, of the insane proliferation of human sacrifices in pre-Columbian South America.
MT: And Nazism?
RG: Our era has already lived through or is preparing to live through the collapse of the three most powerful attempts to replace religion. The collapse of Nazi Germany is the failure of a neo-paganism whose master thinkers are Nietzsche and Heidegger. The collapse of Communism is the failure of Marxism. A third collapse looms, and I hope we'll be able to avoid it: the collapse of capitalist democracies, which would be the failure of scientism, of our attempts to reduce the problems of humankind to a false objectivity, to a sort of mental and physical hygiene, in the manner of "unbridled capitalism" and psychoanalysis.
Whereas Marxism was originally based on hope, on a deviation of Christian love, Nazism is overtly anti-Christian. I think that there are presentiments of this in Nietzsche, who says clearly that, in the Christian world, it is no longer possible to make the sacrifices that according to him are indispensable; in his late period, this is what Nietzsche is really saying.
MT: Really?
RG: See for yourself: "Through Christianity, the individual was made so important, so absolute, that he could no longer be sacrificed: but the species endures only through human sacrifice ... Genuine charity demands sacrifice for the good of the species—it is hard, it is full of self-overcoming, because it needs human sacrifice. And this pseudo humaneness called Christianity wants it established that no one should be sacrificed."
The true "greatness" of National-Socialism—an expression that was actually used by Martin Heidegger in his Introduction to Metaphysics—consisted, it seems to me, in openly combatting the project of a society without scapegoats or sacrificial victims, that is to say the Christian and modern project that Nietzsche was paradoxically the first to identify. National-Socialism seeks to render this project null and void. The idea is to deliberately go back to scapegoating, which is necessarily more criminal than archaic unconsciousness of scapegoating. Neo-paganism can lead only to that. They wanted to make a new myth by taking the Jews as victims, and they even wanted to make a new primitive myth, to go back into the German forest.
MT: Nazism is a deluded and deliberate attempt to refashion myth?
RG: Yes, in my opinion, it's a sin against the Holy Spirit. It's making victims while being aware of doing so, and for quasi-spiritual reasons, so as to close ranks at the expense of scapegoats. Marxism, to the contrary, has ultraChristian roots!
MT: That's what I was going to say. There are flagrant resemblances between Christianity and Marxism: in both cases, there is talk, or was talk, of love, of conversion, of a Paradise to come that would spread over the entire planet. It's almost the same words, pronounced by two enemy brothers. Just now you yourself spoke of "accidents with a high probability of occurrence in the Christian world." Do you mean that the emergence of Marxism owed something to Christianity?
RG: It's deviated Christianity, to the extent that utopia necessarily fails. So, to perpetuate it, so as not to recognize the failure, there's a need for victims—in order to explain why there are still victims! And because the workers are poor and remain poor, it's the fault of the bourgeoisie, of the imperialists, and so on. You can see this logic at work even at the micro level. I remember a news story that struck me. At the beginning of the Gorbachev era, two ships collided in the Black Sea and sunk, causing a huge death toll. Whereas people in the West, in such cases, tend first to ask questions about the technical state of the ships, the signaling system, and so on, the Soviet authorities immediately asked: "Who is the guilty party?" It doesn't seem like much, but it may make it possible to understand centuries of scientific evolution and probably the technical superiority of the Christian West: mechanization as such can develop once human thought, in its attempt to come to grips with the natural world, is freed from the mechanisms of scapegoating. In a technological universe, you can't afford to replace technical causes with guilty parties. If, when a plane crashes, you're content to point the finger at the guilty party, it's quite obvious that other accidents will happen ... And sooner or later there won't be any more planes at all!
Even if the institution of Christianity was, on a local scale, the instrument or the instigator of witch hunts, Christianity is the true destroyer of such practices, because it makes human beings aware of the arbitrary nature of the persecutory snowballing that leads to violence. It does this by way of the Passion, which is itself a persecutory escalation unveiled and condemned as such. The most remarkable thing, historically speaking, about the end of the Middle Ages, is not the epidemic of witchcraft, nor its repression, but the fact that it's the last one; it's the advent of a world in which belief in witchcraft is seen as a barely comprehensible absurdity. The idea that one shouldn't believe in this sort of thing becomes a common heritage, shared by the vast majority of people. It's no longer the exclusive and poorly-guarded privilege of a few rare emancipated individuals. Unbelief with regard to witchcraft seems to us to go without saying, so much so that we unhesitatingly point the finger on behalf of a certainty that seems natural, universally human. But where these matters are concerned, what's universally human would instead be to believe in witchcraft.
MT: Let me return to my summary. Christianity— and many of its adversaries have criticized it for this—thus really does deal a mortal blow to the specific cultures that we see disappearing every day. But, for you, this is a positive contribution. Christianity proves all cultures guilty of lying and initiates the unification of humanity. With the liberation of the Eastern Bloc countries, have we taken a giant step forward, all of a sudden?
RG: We're justified in our surprise, because, even if the process is unstoppable in the long run, it unfolds in a varied and chancy way. When people finally get around to studying the possible influence of individuals on history, they should devote a chapter to Gorbachev.
MT: In his case, one wonders if he was acting consciously or unconsciously, because you have the sense that events transformed him a great deal without his knowledge.
RG: I don't see the disappearance of cultures as a positive contribution. And I prefer to put my money on the individual and to grant Gorbachev a good dose of conscious will. Had there been another Brezhnev in his position, the whole situation might have lasted another fifty years. Totalitarian systems have a very short life expectancy: everyone realizes that the victims on which they are based are innocent; whereas, in the case of "true" myths, in pre-Christian societies, nobody realized this.
MT: The acceleration of globalization seems to lend support to what you say. It is even starting to look like there's only one possible political regime left: democracy.
RG: For centuries all human beings wanted to do was expand their horizons, and today, when the least significant news story has universal implications, when every phenomenon is global, our intellectuals turn up their noses. They assure us that "meaning is something purely local, that the real can only be grasped on a small scale." All value judgment aside, to assert that history is meaningless at the very moment that its meaning is staring us right in the face is a marvelous paradox! Ideology is dead. All that remains is the formidable difference that separates our world from all those that came before it: today, victims have rights. If you could talk with Greek or Roman functionaries and you tried to suggest to them that victims have rights, it wouldn't even make them laugh. They wouldn't understand. It was unthinkable in any world but our own. Whereas today this language isn't challenged by anyone. Everyone keeps saying that there are no more absolute, immutable "values" that living human beings take as self-evident—but isn't the concern for victims a value? The genius of Nietzsche made him capable of seeing that this value defines our era; but he did everything he could to fight it. All he saw in the Christian attitude was resentment, endless jeremiads, mediocre pity: it was doubtless already a little true in his era, and it's even truer today; but it isn't true at the origin, nor fundamentally: he mistook the caricature for the original. The people who defend him today talk about every Nietzsche but that one: that one is the only true, and the only, Nazi thinker. We want to forget that Nietzsche and Nazism are indissolubly linked.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from When These Things Begin by René Girard, Trevor Cribben Merrill. Copyright © 2014 Michigan State University. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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