René Girard VI: Art of War
The text below is an old draft of an excerpt from the book Catharses.
Girard’s last and incomplete book was Achever Clausewitz, a critique of the famous Prussian’s classic and influential work on war. Girard’s goal was not to write a military manual of use to leaders and generals. Rather, it is a macro discussion on where the future of war will lead humanity. If an embattled soldier is to read it, he would find no use in it when it comes to figuring out how to get himself out of enemy encirclement.
This is in contrast to Sun Tzu’s classic work The Art of War, written as a pragmatic manual. Rather than telling us all to play nice, it accepts war as an eternal given. It would agree that “only the dead have seen the end of war." It features gems such as the following:
All warfare is based on deception.
Opportunities multiply as they are seized.
If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant.
Yet, mixed with its cold-blooded calculation is a categorical dislike of war:
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.
The reader of Art of War should feel reassured that the author dislikes war. Taking battle advice from a blood-thirsty warmonger is rather like taking poker advice from a gambling addict. And one gets a similar balanced feeling reading René Girard. His entire life’s work is an attempt to decipher the true nature of violence, but he does so only with the conviction and a mission to rob violence of its power.
Rene Girard views all violence as being rooted in mimesis, the imitative process by which humans acquire the desires of others. As people begin to compete for the same object, they become rivals, and when conflict breaks out, they become enemies. The same dynamic plays out at all levels, from personal rivalries to international wars. Putting aside the pacifist, bird’s eye perspective of Girard himself, can we use his unique insights to develop a battle manual? Is there a mimetic-theory art of war?
Can we use mimetic theory in the fog of war to determine if we are fighting the right kind of battle? I will try to do just that here. I would like to start by considering our resemblance to our enemy. The more we resemble each other, the more likely it is that we are in a pointless type of war. The more different we are, the more likely we are to be justified in our fight.
Girard famously talks about tragic conflict. The more adversaries are under the delusion that they are different and opposite of each other, the more they resemble each other to outside observers. Their conflict moves ever further from rational settlement and becomes increasingly a vain and blind collision that will destroy both of them and their surroundings. If this is the foolishness of tragic conflict, then the wisdom of the righteous conflict, if there is such a thing, would consist in trying to truly differentiate ourselves from the enemy. This wisdom of seeking differentiation rather than a dumb collision of symmetric forces can also be found in Sun Tzu’s work. For that matter, it can be discerned in many theories of war and martial arts.
The concept of deception is closely related to differentiation, to avoidance of symmetric "evil twin" conflict. It is prominent in Sun Tzu and Clausewitz, and as I would imagine, in any military academy. Fighting sports including boxing or jiu-jitsu are replete with deception tactics. A jiu-jitsu instructor will tell you that the sport is the art of using the opponent’s strength against him. A professional boxer will set up his knockout punch by priming his opponent to expect a different power punch. All theories of battle make deception a central tactic while considering head-on open collision to be exactly the opposite of anything worthy to be called a tactic. All war strategy implies that the tragic conflict of twin brothers engaging in symmetric blow-for-blow is the dumbest thing one can do.
A major objection to the approach of avoiding resemblance will come from a careful reader of Girard who will remind us that the more heated the confrontation, the more the adversaries begin to resemble each other, and the less likely they are to become aware of their similarity. Their whole fight is a crescendo of accusations in which they place each other on the ends of opposites: hero versus traitor, charitable versus hateful, wise versus foolish. Telling the tragic heroes to wake up to the senselessness of their fight is something already done by the chorus of the Greek tragedy, and it never works. The chorus begs for de-escalation and points to the impending doom, but never to any avail. The warring twins inevitably end up destroying each other and those around them.
The audacious proposal we make here is that it is possible for an embattled warrior to rise above the accursed spell of the tragic hero and perceive the reality of his situation even in the pitch of battle. It is possible for a soldier whose spirituality has passed beyond the archaic spirituality of pre-classical Greece, in which gods capriciously play with the lives of great individuals. As Girard explains, Greek gods are capricious because the people who worship them live a religion founded on the scapegoat mechanism. Because the collective killing of the scapegoat is associated with both the chaos that precedes it and the peace that follows it, the gods are viewed as both bringers of curses and blessings.
In war, we never want to play the role of tragic adversaries, who are unable to truly assess their situation because they are not conscious of the mimetic nature of their conflict. They cannot confess that they desire the same object and that they want to take each other’s place. They make the romantic virtue of their obsession with the object of desire and assign to the desire of their rival all the evil intentions. The eloquence in throwing accusations at the rival springs from the speaker's inner being, in whose shades lurk the same vices he ascribes to his rival. The adversaries have the same objective, and the double-faced emotions driving them towards it are the same. Each rival claims the bright face for himself, and the dark face he ascribes to the rival.
Furthermore, the object of the desire of the two rivals is metaphysical. Mimetic desire is never a desire for a physical object itself; it is always a desire for being. The only reason we want the same object as the rival is because we are fighting for the same exclusive status in the eyes of others. The Greeks and Trojans fought over Helen. If to the reader of the Iliad it seems petty that two mighty nations would slaughter each other for a decade over a love affair, it is precisely because this was the point Homer was making: this great war was not over a clash of rational interests. The Greeks and Trojans fought over metaphysical primacy. It was a matter of “ego,” as we say today.
It can be argued that all war results from irrational and jealous strife over status. Not that there are never any clashes of interest. For example, every inch of the South China Sea that the Chinese gain, the Vietnamese and the Filipinos lose. Yet what could provoke an armed conflict in the South China Sea cannot be rational. If reason reigned amongst all the nations involved, it would be negotiation and not war that would resolve the conflict. As Clausewitz puts it, a perfectly rational war would be “a kind of war by algebra,” where the two sides figure out who gets what based on their strengths and weaknesses, and without any resort to violence.
Yet, violence always trickles in to spoil peaceful resolution. And it trickles in just the way Girard describes it. One rival approaches the other in mimicking his desire for a particular possession, which reinforces the other’s jealousy. Instead of a reasonable and frank conversation, there’s an escalation of aggressive gestures that inflames the pride of the adversaries and transforms them, physically even, into animals primed for battle.
The deepest cause of war is not to be found in conflict of rational interests. It is in the Girardian mechanism of reciprocating aggression of rivals that gradually approach and come to resemble each other. Their ultimate and key point of resemblance is that they desire the one and the same exclusive metaphysical status.
The less likely we share the same metaphysical desire with the enemy, the more likely it is that we are not ensnared by the caprice of gods and doomed to tragic self-destruction. If we do not resemble the enemy, he should appear to us as a queer stranger who burst upon us unexpectedly, as a result of a mimetic conflict to which we are strangers. Most typically, the enemy’s mimetic conflict is one within their society, which then seeks out an external scapegoat. In such a case, we cannot be blamed for having the bad luck of becoming the arbitrary scapegoat for the enemy’s internal issues.
A great example of unwitting participants in war were the relatively civilized and religious societies of Asia and Europe that found themselves invaded by the Mongols in the twelfth century. It cannot be denied that one motive for Mongol conquest was accumulation of power. Yet, it is a well-documented fact that what kicked off the Mongol invasion was a severe sacrificial crisis among many Mongol tribes. The trigger that exploded the Mongol hordes into a wild conquest of the world was the chaotic internecine violence that reigned inside their nation. The tremendous store of violence generated by this Mongolian sacrificial crisis was unleashed upon the rest of the world, which became the designated sacrificial victim for the Mongols. It united them marvellously.
If the metaphysical desires of the enemy are completely queer to us, it is an indicator that we are not facing our mimetic rival. Mimetic conflict may be the root of all violence, but in this case, we were not party to that mimetic conflict. Our sacrificial system may have been functioning perfectly fine before the enemy showed up. Whatever the enemy’s reason was for invading us, we have no responsibility for it; their attack was not in response to our goading them on in the blind process of stichomythia, the alternating exchange of insults in tragic dialogue.
Once we can be sure that we are not engaged in a tragic conflict, the next question to deal with is the question of strategy. Assuming we are not cornered into direct military conflict, how can we escape the wrath of the enemy?
The banal response here is to engage in dialogue rather than confrontation. This is surely the right choice between the two; however, mimetic theory suggests that such a dialogue will have a strong tendency to slide into stichomythia. In other words, what may start off as a rational negotiation might degenerate into an exchange of insults, each round injecting the adversaries with ever more aggression and ever less reason. The initially reasonable sides begin to resemble each other as their wrath builds up, and together they begin to resemble two twin rams rowing their hooves at each other and preparing to butt horns. This path then ends in a tragic confrontation like any other, though it may have started asymmetrically. And unlike battles of rams, battles of humans, the animals with the most extraordinary mimetic capabilities, tend to end in mass death.
On the other hand, if we have the wisdom to resist engaging in stichomythia, and remain silent to insults, we play right into the enemy’s perception of us as the appropriate scapegoat. For the essential trait of the scapegoat is that he does not retaliate to volleys of aggression, opening up the prospect of the aggression against him to be "the final word of violence" and to put an end to the odious cycle of back-and-forth exchanges of the mimetic crisis.
Yet, we do not want to end up the sacrificial lamb, as much as we do not want to engage in the tragic conflict. From that, a mimetic-theory mantra for the art of war could be this:
Don’t be a rival, and don’t be a victim.
All specific advice for waging war aligns with this mantra. A fighter or a general is advised to avoid open confrontation, which is to say, to not be a rival. On the other hand, passivity is not an option either, because it leaves the sacrificial crisis within the enemy ranks to increase in pitch and increase in the intent to use us as the sacrificial victim to resolve that crisis. Thus, our battle must not be open, but it also must not be timid. Our battle must be deceptive.
All warfare is based on deception.
I'm nowhere near qualified here to map out a comprehensive set of particular and specific battle advice. But I can make a cursory list of tactics that align with the mantra. When it comes to politics, we should avoid becoming rivals through distancing ourselves from our opponent’s metaphysical desires, respecting our opponent by recognizing their claims to certain physical and metaphysical territory, and if needed, flattering our opponents. We can establish ties with the opponent, which would consist of rituals to diffuse aggression, such as sports games. If the enemy is bent on attacking us, before any violence breaks out we must signal our ability and willingness to retaliate, rather than act as sheep before slaughter. This takes the form of a conspicuous display of national accomplishments, military parades, and other shows of strength. This is all to signal to the enemy that as a retaliating subject, we are not suitable for the role of their sacrificial lamb. Otherwise, and somewhat more in the spirit of Machiavelli, we could try to deflect the wrath of our opponent from us to someone else.
When it comes to field tactics, war manuals will analyze methods of avoiding direct rivalry through decoys, deceptions of strength and weakness, or deceptions of good timing.
An apt image for the spirit of deception can be seen in the famous tradition of bullfighting. The matador faces a magnificent and furious beast, and he stands in contrast to it with an air of poise and elegance. The elegant matador masters the beast chiefly through deception: he holds the red cape and drives the bull to charge it. The wounded and crazed bull evokes the tragic hero, who blinded with pain and rage, seeks the first and most obvious thing in front of him to destroy. He seeks the scapegoat. The matador is like a Greek god, or the wise man, who stands on two feet above the delusion of blind violence and vanquishes his opponent through differentiated check on his emotions. Matador is anything but angry.
All war tactics are tactics of the matador: draw the wrath of your enemy away from yourself, and to a place where you want it, and slay him in his blind rage.
Read more in the book Catharses.
