René Girard Part II: The Monomaniac
The text below is an old draft of an excerpt from the book Catharses.
It is a very deep question to ask how the modern age came about and what exactly is its nature. It is a fascinating question and if you have the leisure it may be spiritually beneficial for you to meditate on it, whether you answer it or not. Perhaps it is better if you don’t answer it. I certainly will not attempt to do that here.
What I will bring up here is a specific phenomenon engendered by the modern age: the monomaniac intellectual. This is a thinker who comes up with a good idea, a brilliant vision, and then tries to explain everything using it. René Girard fits the description.
Who was the first one to do so? Isaac Newton comes to mind. He may have inspired the trend. His great synthesis of scientific notions in the seventeenth century created a seemingly complete account of the natural world. Intellectuals in his wake begun to think that man is now capable of complete knowledge of reality, a divine gnosis that will finally bring about the much hoped for salvation.
But I will not blame Sir Newton because I happen to be familiar with his biography. He was certainly not above vanity and petty bickering over precedence. He and Leibniz hated each other over who “invented” calculus. Robert Hooke was another rival. But at the end of the day Newton was religious enough, he was a mystic enough, to acknowledge that the laws he formulated that predict motions of celestial bodies have nothing to do with why those laws exists, nor what or Who has established them. In the end, Newton knew that the new science doesn’t really explain any real, metaphysical whys.
It appears that the intellectual monomaniac trend rather started in the German-speaking part of Europe. Maybe it was Kant, or Hegel, or one of those German philosophers, who first had the patently modern desire to explain everything. The beginnings may be obscure, to me at least, but the hay-day of this attitude is easy to finger. It occurred in the last half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.
Perhaps the best example of the monomaniac intellectual, in the negative sense, is Karl Marx. Here was a man who arrived at a particularly lucid idea that many social institutions exploit the working class. He could have said: “Hey guys, here’s a really insightful idea I’d like to share with you. Let’s find a way to apply it somehow to better the human lot.” But no, he took that idea, and in attempt to be another Newton, or Kant, or Aristotle, or God, or whoever, he took that one single probably good idea and used it to explain the totality of reality. When you got a hammer, and you really like your hammer, then everything looks like a nail.
Then there was Sigmund Freud. He also came up with several interesting and related ideas all more or less dealing with human sexuality. Again, he could have written a specialized treatise or two on them, or maybe a novel, and it would have been a great novel. But no. He had to explain everything in terms of the Oedipal Complex. There was no God but the god of wanting to have sex with your mother.
There was also Charles Darwin. He was a scientist, like Newton, so I will leave him alone. But his work engendered Social Darwinism, yet another monomaniacal social doctrine that describes literally all life in terms of genes.
Monomaniacal doctrines continued popping left and right. Pretty much every cult leader of the twentieth century fits the mold. Today in the twenty-first century we have a gaggle of tenured physicists chasing after the Theory of Everything. It is another supreme irony of the world that we live in, and yet another supreme irony of the modern age, that precisely at the time when old Western religions, and especially Christianity, were denounced as totalitarian and monomaniacal, the very thinkers who denounced them as such were doing so in order to build up their own monomaniacal systems. They were jealous of what they perceived to be Christianity’s totalitarian character. Their perception of religions had its justifications, but ultimately it was dishonest.
Or now that we have René Girard’s work, it is not all so ironic any more. Monomaniacal thinkers bashing falsely perceived monomaniacal doctrines is a stock Girardean phenomenon.
The problem with René Girard is not that his ideas are not brilliant. They are. The problem is that Girard is, as of today at least, is the last of the “giants” of monomaniacal systems. He got the brilliant idea that the imitative nature of desire causes a lot of conflict. He brilliantly developed the insight that religious ritual is meant to diffuse social strife. But then, he took this latter insight to explain the totality of religion.
An admiring reader such as myself will be grateful for Girard’s brilliant analyses. Girard will make you aware of the power and dangers of social media. His analysis of desire and conflict can make you see events in your personal history through a new and revealing lens. His angle on social strife will enlighten your take on modern politics of every form. He even holds the key to Silicon Valley culture specifically through the connection with his Stanford University student and tech billionaire Peter Thiel. His exegesis of ancient myths is compelling, as it debunks or at least puts into doubt many dominant modern interpretations. Finally, and as should be expected, his system discredits the other monomaniacal systems mentioned above.
Girard’s writing style matches the monomaniacal spirit of his doctrine. His chapters are too long and too slow. He uses the phrase “without a doubt” too much. There is a rowing repetition of the same point, for example how collective violence is linked to the concept of “feast”. Each repetition touches ofn a slightly different detail, a slightly different possible objection, and then discredits that objection. This attention to detail may give an appearance of rigour, but it may also look like insecurity. There are so many objections!
Girard has stated that he was not a Christian when he began his work, but converted later on as a consequence of what he realized through his work. His early books certainly seem atheistic. His take on the Oedipus myth aims to discredit Freud’s analysis, but the analysis he proposes is quite equally rationalistic. His analysis in Violence and the Sacred has nothing to do with the divine as actually a real God or real gods. Sacred is really nothing more than the fear of violence. God still isn’t really real, he is merely a metaphor for apocalyptic violence unleashed by human rivalries. And Violence is real.
I have yet to read all of his books, but internet references to Girard don’t mention anything outside of this concept of God and religion. All religion, all rituals are geared ultimately towards the one single purpose of preventing all-against-all violence triggered by rivalry. All rituals and all myths are ultimately about sacrifice, the only way to diffuse this violence. Anything else you can think of are merely twisted or “dissimulated” reflections. Really?
What about God as the Creator? What about the question of physical universe and where that came from? I can admit that I’m more contentious and envious than I’d like to think when I’m studying science or contemplating the mountains. But there is still science, and there are still mountains. Are these merely details? Are the wonderful Andes and Himalayas just some extras in the background of human beings hating on each other? I am open to the idea that Andes are most essentially a symbol, and even that every physical vision of the universe is a symbol or a signifier. What I am reserved about is that they are all symbols of mimetic desire and nothing else.
The closest concept of Creation in Girard’s analysis is the creation of culture through the murder of the first victim. Before that there was the darkness of pre-hominid animals and chaos of perfect violence of hominids with freakishly powerful apparatus for imitation. With the first lynching comes the first lasting harmony and thence the first culture and - ecce homo - man has been created. This view is reminiscent of pagan myths of creation from chaos in a way that adds credit to both Girard and the pagan myths. But it runs counter the the biblical and orthodox insistence that the physical universe was created by God ex nihilo. If the nihilo part is merely interpreted as nothingness of incoherent apes, then the claim still boils down to the notion that in fact man created God, specifically through the act of sacrificial murder. This is an atheistic argument.
What about other forms of violence and conflict? Let’s say you don’t want to hurt me because violence is bad and it’s all probably because on some level you desire same things as I do, anyways. So knowing that, I can now be a complete jerk and exploit your forbearing kindness. I will kick your humble ass in every contest and take everything you strive for. Thank you very much.
It’s a topic for another essay, but I’ve argued before that “turn the other cheek” cannot mean, “be a coward”. If you are going to be the preacher who plays the “turn the other cheek” tune, I am all ears, after you explain to us how that’s different from being a coward. Or, if you will, explain how turning the other cheek will not turn my children destitute, or at least not make them poorer than your children. One thing among many that I learned from reading Girard that stuck is that it tends to be the broke pharmokoi who get lynched. Thank you very much.
Let’s talk specifically about sacrifice. Before reading Girard, I had my own understanding of sacrifice. I didn’t think my ideas were original. From one end, I related it to thanksgiving. We thank God who created and provided the fruits of this earth to nourish us. By forbearing consumption of these fruits we show deference and recognize that what we possess was a gift. The beautiful concepts of gifts and thanksgiving are absent in Girard’s universe. Come to think of it, Beauty itself is absent.
Another aspect of sacrifice that has been noted by writers throughout history is the idea that sacrifice, as a pricy loss to the community, creates value in the deity to whom it is made. There is the dark and “existentialist” angle to this understanding of sacrifice. Men don’t see a meaning in their lives, which are marked by pain or senseless triviality. The nature around them is cruel and mute. To create meaning, the men create a cause and fight for it. Those who die in that cause pay for it with their blood, and that in itself makes the cause valuable, which is to say meaningful. One may see no purpose in a patriotic war at the beginning, but once so many soldiers laid their lives in the fight, denial of purpose becomes an offence to the dead. The natural fear and awe of death convinces many that the cause is true and that it’s meaning is divine.
Another weakness with mimetic theory is the relatively minor role that love plays in it. Girard may define love as the opposite of violence, or perhaps as a paraphenomenon of mimetic desire. Either definition would make live a derived concept. Yet, in Christian religion, and many other religions, love has a much higher position than that. In Christianity love seems closely associated with God himself; it seems to hold a certain prime-mover position. To Girard, the prime mover of human history is envy. It is the envy of Adam against God, and down here on earth it is the murderous envy of Cain against his brother Abel.
In Girard’s monomaniacal view violence is at the root of all things. All other subjects seem to be merely projections of it. Satan is the embodiment of violence. A saint is a rejection of violence. A celebration is a re-enactment and an expulsion of violence. Sex is a form of violence. The Creation in this view of thing does not consist of entities separated and sculpted by the divine hand of Creator. There are no persons. Like with all monomaniacal systems, there can be only one thing to rule them all, in this case violence. That thing has, would you know it, been deconstructed by the author.
As with Marx and Freud, Girard’s analysis tells us something about the author, not only the world he is trying to explain. Marx’s revulsion toward wealth may have something to do with internalizing the stereotypes of European Jews as plutocrats. Freud, well, had issues with his parents. Girard seems to be the type of guy who was particularly attuned to the emotional undercurrents of envy and desire (he was French, you know). I was not, and that may be part of the reason why I found his work so revelatory.
Read more in the book Catharses.