René Girard XI: A History of Social Cohesion

The text below is an old draft of an excerpt from the book Catharses.

By ancient times kings already transitioned from their original role as delayed sacrificial victims, and ended up with great amounts of authority and respect. The obedience and coordination of resources they could command lead directly to technological and all other civilizational progress. However, their positions remained precarious in proportion to the threat of violence that they faced. Be it internecine conflict of an ignorant archaic village, an enemy raid, or calamities of nature, suffering inflicted upon the community ended up breaking over the king’s head. He may have been deemed offensive to gods and sacrificed to appease them, or executed by his conquerors, which really amounted to the same thing. In those violent days, there was no room for what we today call class resentment. Bare survival and the imperative to stick together was too dominant a concern in the mind of every villager to gripe about the king and his “bureaucracy”. 

Over time, the progress produced by social structuring caused the original threats of violence to recede. A well-organized city had laws that were effective in subduing mimetic conflict. Also, it became proficient at mastering nature to provide a constant food supply. It had fortifications and a trained army to defend again enemies. Although villagers had envied each other even before city states, there they were all more or less in equal social position, and their ways to making peace were simple: unanimous violence against a designated victim. In first structured societies, however, conscious that law was necessary to keep them in the privileged state of culture, people could no longer openly envy those in positions of authority. They could only look at them as what Girard calls external models: those who can be admired, but whose status was beyond one’s ambition. Humans did not need to “invent” this new feeling however, for it already existed in a most fundamental biological relationship, that between parents and children. To every infant mammal, their parents are by instinct their external models. Thus, from the earliest times, an organized society was perceived as an extension of family.

The obvious difference between the relationship of infants and their parents, and that of adults on different levels of social authority, is that the children are absolutely dependent on parents on survival, while the adults can potentially perceive their differentiated roles as interchangeable. The perception of interchangeability would transform the external models in the higher, paternalistic social positions into internal models, which in Girard’s terminology means models that can become rivals. It thus became essential for a well-ordered society to maintain all differentiated social classes as external-model relationships. Failing that, society would become rife with that civilized form of suppressed aggression that we call resentment, the silent killer of social order.

Girard talks of two basic tools for avoiding mimetic rivalry, which is to say, for keeping mediation external within a society. The first is the establishment of systems of prohibitions, which deploys shame as a powerful regulating emotion. Shame can be defined as a fundamental psychic braking mechanism against desire that causes mimetic conflict. It goes back to the very dawn of civilization. Shame made humans wear clothes, and specifically to cover their genitals, as a way of dissimulating sexual desire and inhibiting the fundamental taboo against in-group sex. Starting from there, shame expanded to act as a brake on all desire that could set off mimetic conflict. In the Bible, humanity begins with one desire, that of Adam and Eve desiring the status of God. When they are rebuked, they experience shame for the first time and cover their bodies with loincloths.

Confucianism stands out as an example of a code that places perhaps the most, if not exclusive focus on creating a familial, or externally mediated model for society, and conversely on shame as the negative enforcement of that model. Of course, all cultures incorporate this system to a degree, but Confucianism presents the most elaborate and formalized incarnation of it. One may argue that the Chinese society is especially suited for it by virtue of being the world’s biggest monoculture. The Han perceive themselves as genetically linked, and for this reason it is easier for them to perceive their entire nation as one big family.  

The second way to neutralize class resentment corresponds to the sacrificial mechanism, and it consist of providing a vent for unanimous action that makes men in different social positions either forget about their differences, or to perceive them as justified for the purposes of that action. The targets of unanimous action, or really, of unanimous violence, take several basic forms: victims of ritual sacrifice, external enemy, or struggle against nature. However, as we already mentioned, a well-structured  culture will to a large degree have overcome the existential threat provided by nature. As for ritual sacrifices, their effectiveness wears off as a society moves in time from the foundational murder that the ritual dissimulates. Thus, historically the most popular and most effective method for furnishing a target for collective violence has been war. 

Historians confirm unequivocally that war has been a driver of social cohesion, as well as for technological and cultural development, since the dawn of civilization. This role of war increased in proportion to the degree to which a culture’s rites and rituals lost their sacrificial power. There are many examples of empires for which endless expansionary wars were a way to create social cohesion. Permanent war provided militant Rome with a raison d’être for centuries. And when there were no wars to be fought, there were panem et circenses – bread and gladiatorial games.

A more complex study emerges in how modern societies manage class resentment. To Girard, modernity is marked by the gradual process of worldwide desacralization, or failure of the sacrificial mechanism, through a gradually increasing awareness that the victim is innocent. He credits the work of gradual revelation to “Judeo-Christian” tradition, and especially to the Gospel as the final uncovering of the innocent victim in the person of Jesus Christ. In the modern world, this awareness has spread to the whole world, even to people who are outside of Judeo-Christian tradition. The modern scholarly consensus of course is that desacralization was born out of an evolution of rational thinking that cumulated with modern science, and that debunked not just the religion of the Bible but all other religions. Girard countered this claim with his now celebrated aphorism: “We didn’t stop burning witches because we invented science; we invented science because we stopped burning witches.” Be it as it may, everyone can agree that in the modern world it is more difficult to believe in magic and spells and curses, and therefore more difficult to find a sacred enemy.

Furthermore, the model of society as a family as well as the power of shame to regulate desire have also receded in the modern world. I would argue that at the most basic level, this is precisely due to the recession in the threats of violence that this model was built to fight in the first place. The infant’s subordination to the parent is perfectly legitimate because the infant’s survival is dependent on it. Similarly, in vulnerable societies of ancient times, obedience to social structures was legitimate in as much as it truly helped avoid the threats from internecine strife, external enemy, and nature. However, once society overcomes these threats, then the family model begins to lose legitimacy. The peasants look up to the king and his court, and they don’t see them struggling to keep the peace, to prepare for drought, propitiate god, or prepare for war. They see them in their palaces and possessing exclusive objects. This erodes the image of the rules as parents in the eyes of those not partaking in the objects,  because parents fight to protect the family, but the ruling class no longer has anything to protect anyone against. Shame as a braking mechanism weakens to the degree that the underprivileged cease to perceive the privileged as external models. The mimetic dynamic flips from external to internal. Rivalry for social privilege spreads, not directly between a peasant and a king, but along the many poorly differentiated steps of social class. 

Modern scarcities in traditional scapegoats and external mediation presented novel challenges for maintaining an ordered society. Either a new conception of social relationship had to be developed, or new kings of enemies had to be fabricated. History shows us great examples of both types of solutions. It also shows us that none of them quite work; history has not quite ended yet.

To the first type of modern solution for maintaining order, that of creating new concepts of society, belong all the great social doctrines of modern times. There is Hobbes with his social contract, Marx with control of means production, and Herbert Spencer with his social Darwinism. These three constitute the vectors which can be combined in different proportions to form all of the many other variants of social doctrines. Of the three, the social contract has been the most successful. I think it is because it goes the farthest providing for the existence of mimetic desire, even though it does not take it as a basic force of social experience. Hobbes’ sacralization of private property draws effective prohibitions on acquisitive mimetic desire and thus does well in subduing mimetic crises. Yet, as Girard has pointed out, the desire for private property as an ideal creates yet another object of desire that can destabilize society. English-speaking countries that have implemented social contract, of which the United States of America is the most extreme example, still relied on common sacrificial rites – common “culture” – to maintain peace.

As for communism and social Darwinism, they fail spectacularly because not only do they not take into account mimetic theory, but rather embrace assumptions that run directly counter to it. Communism holds that universal sameness will lead to universal peace, while mimetic theory holds that universal sameness is nothing other than universal chaos of warring rivals, the plague and the flood and the fire and brimstone of ancient myth. While Darwinism abhors universal sameness, it similarly posits that humans are naturally allied to those who are most similar or most related to them, and naturally opposed to those who are not. The ultimate drive of humans and all other animals is to propagate their own genes. Again, this goes counter to mimetic theory, which holds that humans tend to have rivalries with those most similar to them, and that these rivalries, unlike rivalries among other mammals, tend to result in extermination.

The other modern approach to dampening social struggle is invention of novel objects of unanimous struggle. The central and most defining of the modern era was a renewed struggle against nature, not in attempt to wrest reliable sustenance out of it, but to subdue it in a certain metaphysical sense. The struggle, seminally introduced by Francis Bacon, was to uncover the secrets of nature through science and to turn it into a servant of human race through technology. The turning towards nature can be viewed as some sort of a pact between the subject and the model of mimetic theory, to draw a permanent truce in their rivalry over objects, and to focus their attention to manipulating the object in a way that it can be accessible to both rivals. As Jesus had multiplied the fish and the loaves, and as alchemists had tried to turn lead into gold, the scientists will multiply all objects to satisfy the desires of all. Of course, the scientists have had impressive success, though frustrated desires are with us perhaps more than ever. Girard relates their success to the same demystifying historical process that had weakened the scapegoating mechanism. The dissolution of magic of scapegoats and gods came hand in hand with dissolution of magic in nature, allowing nature to be seen as amenable to reason.

Science and technology have led to tremendous advances in human condition. Alas, they failed to rid the world of strife. The technological project captivates the unifies people in its struggle, but the objects it produces do not cause covetousness to disappear. This is because covetousness is mimetic. We do not desire objects in and of themselves; we desire objects because possessed by others. For technological progress to bring peace, it must keep on progressing and providing a continuous stream of new objects that with new metaphysical significations, distributed unequally. The new aspirations thus generated feed aspiration and keep of resentment at bay.

Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the term “creative destruction” to signify the need for continuous transformation of industry required to keep the system going. In more recent times, the concept of “disruption” is used to describe the heroic process of continually innovating and destroying old technologies. Schumpeter was inspired by Karl Marx’s ideas on business cycles, which Marx used to attack capitalism. Yet communism itself developed essentially equivalent idea of “eternal revolution”. Both capitalism and communism, both being materialistic ideologies of progress, come together in an understanding that desires can be permanently managed only if they are permanently changing. The model and the mediator in both cases are meant to be placed in a permanent hypnosis by endless flicker of objects.

Yet, in the twenty first century the materialistic projects have hit up against certain ceilings. These include the destruction of environment, the threat of weapons of mass destruction. The latest obstacle has come in the form of digital communications technologies, which, instead of giving us an object of distraction from our mutual resentments, have created channels for amplifying our resentments with unprecedented power. The age of multiplication of objects seems to be drawing to a close.

Societies today find themselves painted into a corner when it comes managing mimetic strife. Victims have been found to be innocent, authority has been desacralized, and natural environment has been  has been violated. Novel and strange techniques for resolving social struggle are now appearing, but none have shown great promise just yet.

The technological quest has sought to extend itself in several ways. One way has been the quest for clean technologies. Until late twentieth century technology was all about subduing nature, but that sounds too “rapey” now. From now on, technology is all about rescuing nature. Another tangent has been the march towards space age. There is no environment to harm up there, and surely uncovering the whole universe will keep us busy from hating each other for a long time. Of course, the champions of space exploration do not see it as a cure for something as petty as human vanity. They see it is the the true and ultimate objective to satisfy human desire, “the final frontier”.

The last technological trajectory I would like to mention here is the trans-humanist project. Here, the idea is to fundamentally modify what it means to be human through biotechnology and artificial intelligence. It is the least clearly defined vision of the three sciences, for by its very nature trans-humanism cannot articulate a concrete vision. The pitch goes something like this: “We will become something completely different; we don’t know what it is, but it will be something much better.” For both space exploration and trans-humanism, it seems as though humanity, unable to identify the right scapegoat to cast out from the world, has finally settled on casting humanity itself.

The first name that comes to my mind when I think of technological leaders of today is Elon Musk, whose three big scientific enterprises cover all three technological trajectories I outlined above. He runs Tesla, the electric vehicle manufacturer, SpaceX, the hopeful leader of space age, and Neuralink, and attempt to fuse human brain with computers. Musk’s success has nothing to do with his scientific or engineering brilliance, whose fruits I cannot locate. His brilliance primarily lies in what his detractors and many admirers gave called “marketing wizardry”. Musk is brilliantly attuned to the ontological crisis that the new doubts in technological progress has caused in modern society, and to the powerful social need to continue the hypnosis by object going, lest people turn towards their neighbors and begin to resent them.

Not everyone is good at math, however, and for those who are more people-oriented the latest approach to social harmony has been the paradoxical quest, not to hunt for a scapegoat, but to hunt for those who hunt for scapegoats. It starts with the idea that scapegoating is always bad, which in absolute terms it is, but it ends with scapegoating the scapegoaters. Western society is burdened with historical guilt of scapegoating various identity groups: the poor, ethnic and religious minorities, and groups defined along a multiplying array of vectors. To expiate for its past sins, society looks to expunge those who hate the designated vulnerable groups. However, this cannot possibly end scapegoating, because the scapegoating mechanism, as René Girard makes clear, always involves unanimous violence against the victim. As long as old hatreds are no longer unanimous, they are no longer scapegoating mechanism, whatever else they may be – and they can certainly be legitimate problems. Thus, rather than eliminate scapegoating, identity politics perpetuate it. They fight fire with fire. 

In his book Things Hidden Since The Foundation of The World, Girard talks at length about sacrificial and non-sacrificial interpretations of the Bible, but also of human experience in general. Sacrificial mindset, so to speak, is a mindset that can generate meaning only through the sacrificial mechanism, which is to say only through building structures through unanimous violence. If the violence is not literal violence against other humans, in my view, it could also mean aggression dissimulated and pointed towards some sort of conquest, such as conquest of space or of human nature. Non-sacrificial mindset on the other hand is renunciation of the scapegoating mechanism altogether and turning towards one’s neighbor in love. Girard argues that true human progress in the biggest possible picture is nothing but the gradual progress from sacrificial to non-sacrificial. I cannot see exactly how that will play out, but this proposal appeals to me more than any of the other alternatives I brought up in this essay.

Read more in the book Catharses.