René Girard XIV: Immigrants
The text below is an old draft of an excerpt from the book Catharses.
In theory, West is supposed to be blind to ethnic identities. They are seen as not much more than Platonic categories of mostly aesthetic nature. An ethnic group has a colorful, “vibrant” look, sound, or cuisine, but one’s ethnic background should not be correlated with politics, a field that is expected to be handled only with the undifferentiated, pure reason of rational human agents. Immigrant groups in the academia have been sanitized of the atavistic tendency to form interest groups and cause conflict. Perhaps like in voodoo magic, these immigrant dolls fashioned by academics are expected to induce changes in the real, flesh-and-bones immigrants.
Economic theory provides a good example of a grossly oversimplified model of immigration. Here, just as free trade can serve to efficiently allocate capital investments anywhere on the globe, levelling developed and developing countries, immigration can serve to compensate for negative natality rates or to bring in workers for low-end jobs facing a domestic “talent gap”, and thus level the global labor pool. There is no mention of national loyalty or identity politics.
Yet, the more these abstract social doctrines become orthodoxy, the more chaos we see unfolding in the media. What has until yesterday been called multiculturalism has led to a multiplication of politicking identities. The U.S. crusade for free trade of the nineties and noughts has handed the country’s economic primacy over to the centralist and nationalist behemoth that is China. The new generations that are supposed to abandon their various traditional cultures for the new secular religion, or “philosophy”, have lurched back into conservatism, only this time without national consensus.
The rationalist doctrines that dictated immigration policy are facing great doubts today. Even its most ardent zealots, like Angela Merkel, have been given pause. This is a good moment then, to view immigration in an alternative light. Let’s consider it in the light of René Girard’s mimetic theory, which places human strife and violence at the centre of society. Such an analysis does not necessarily contradict the more conventional models linking immigration to politics or economy; rather, it goes upstream of these to get at the deeper source of phenomena that they reflect.
“Politics don’t create opposition, opposition creates politics”, says Girard. Mimetic struggle in a society always tends to polarisation of resentment towards a unified target. Archaic scapegoats and sacrificial mechanisms are now invalidated, so a nation must look for a common enemy elsewhere. Given the proliferation of weaponry that ensures mutually assured destruction, and given the ontological failure of twentieth-century wars, conventional warfare can no longer supply valid scapegoats, either. Thus, people in a modern democracy are left to polarise against political enemies. In all democracies this polarisation ends up creating two camps who serve as scapegoats to each other: conservatives and progressives.
All democratic politics ultimately boils down to only two dominant parties because the duality provides the most efficient scapegoating arrangement. Similar to how in the archaic village, multiple mutual resentments resolve themselves by uniting against a common sacrificial victim, in a modern society, resentments among three or more political camps will ultimately truncate to the minimum number required for conflict, which is two. That all democratic countries end up with only two major political parties reveals that popular politics is less about rational self-interest and more about creating unanimity through aggression against a common scapegoat.
The conservative and progressive parties are the warring twins of Girardian theory. The object of their contention is the nation, a metaphysical damsel in distress that needs to be rescued and protected. The conflict consists in endless back-and-forth in which one camp accuses the other of being the violator and proclaims themselves the saviour of this damsel. The two camps are obstacles to each other and as such, they need each other, for as Girard tells us, it is the strength of the obstacle that bestows value to the object of contention.
The conservative and progressive leaders essentially claim that, if the other side were to disappear, the nation would reach some state of transcendence. Yet this transcendence can never be reached. It is a metaphysical mirage. The other side can never be eliminated. If you cut a magnetic dipole in half, each half will still have two poles.
Progressives and conservatives both strive desperately to show their own camp as the one possessing transcendence, of being on the “right side of history”. Transcendence is anything but an objective reality; it is only generated in the eyes of the beholder, who is always someone below, an admirer. Thus, the two political camps use the narcissistic tactic of looking for others who would look up to them in admiration, who would take up their heroic cause. Immigrants turn out to be ideal for this role.
The progressives battle to rescue the nation from what they perceive as oppressive traditionalist power, which includes the iron dogmas and insufferable moralising of religious authorities. Immigrants from different traditions are naturally at odds to the host country’s traditions, so bringing in immigrants should weaken domestic conservative power. The rejection by immigrants of the host country’s traditionalist dogmas is a powerful validation of the transcendental claims of its opponents, the progressives. They hope that mass immigration will create cultural confusion and clashes, a chaos from which it will be easier to convert everyone to the progressive cause, which claims to offer a rational, universal, and secular culture for a globalised, transcendental future.
However, immigrants can stroke the egos of reactionaries as well. Whenever the economy slows, those who are ahead in the game find it hard to justify their model role as captains of industry and of progress. Instead of admiration, they are subject to resentment from the masses, who demand more equality. Here, immigrants from poorer countries can be brought in as a more docile labour force. They will accept lower wages with gratitude. Their new job and new life in a wealthier country represents for them great progress. They will carry none of the long-simmering resentments against the host country’s privileged class.
An engineer with family roots in the Bay Area is less likely to be enthralled by an American tech billionaire than is an engineer who immigrated from rural India. It is not merely that the Indian from a poor family appreciates every dollar more. Furthermore, a foreigner from a materially humble background is bound to be better raised against greed. He is less likely to perceive his billionaire American employer as an internal model, a possible rival. Finally, a foreigner will not carry long-festering resentments characteristic among social classes who had spent several generations putting up with each other.
The effectiveness of immigration as ego-booster for conservatives as well as progressives drove its tremendous growth in the twenty first century West. Immigrants are constantly wooed in today’s media from both sides of the political battle. They are called on by progressives to fight against traditional sources of power, which naturally don’t include immigrants’ own traditions. From the conservative side, the immigrants are called on to appreciate the improvement in the living standards that was freely and graciously given them by the host country.
Though the two sides have opposing visions of what the idealised form of their country looks like, both sides of the political spectrum can see in immigrants international coverts to their national cause, true believers whose choice of new homeland testify to its greatness. Thus, having immigrants becomes a matter of international prestige and competition, especially among smaller democracies, such as Canada or those in Scandinavia, which have limited other means to project international relevance.
This battle for the hearts and minds of immigrants is not the whole story. Immigration is also used to diffuse social conflict, or at least to transfer it from one target to another. In his book Violence and the Sacred, Girard talks about the substituting role of sacrificial victims, which in his two main examples were animals. In the first example, Jacob slaughters sheep who play a doubly substituting role in his quest to obtain his father Isaac’s blessing. First, lamb meat is used to make the stew that Isaac requested, a type of sacrificial offering, and secondly, Jacob covers his hands and neck in the sheep’s wool, to fool his blind father into taking him for his hairy older brother, Esau. In his second example, Girard tells the story of Odysseus and the Cyclops. The animals are used by Odysseus and his crew to escape the cave of the blinded giant by clinging to the bellies of Cyclops’ sheep. Here too, the sheep are placed between Cyclops and his human captives, preventing violence.
In the same book, Girard mentions other, minor examples. In the Iliad, angry Ajax slaughters a herd of sheep whom, in his deluded rage, he mistakes for Greek soldiers. In all cases Girard uncovers the idea of the substitute victim. Violent urges cannot diffuse on their own, and if the object of their wrath is out of reach, there is a danger that they will settle upon arbitrary victims near at hand, even family members. A traumatised solider who returns from war may become abusive to his family and even to himself, through addiction.
In the modern democratic society, the violence that threatens to flare up from the long-simmering resentments between social classes can be fooled by immigrants. The angst of the working-class incumbents can be transferred from the rich and channelled towards xenophobia targeting immigrants. While class-struggle type of unrest poses a serious threat to social stability, xenophobia is a much less harmful pastime. With twenty-first century mores, shaped by the trauma of twentieth-century bloodshed, the powers that be count it as inconceivable that xenophobia in any of its forms could fuel anything worse than sporadic mass shootings. Over the long run, xenophobia should rather exert a steady pressure on the immigrants to assimilate, while reinforcing patriotism among the mistrustful masses, or at least keeping them distracted from class struggle.
In a true sacrificial fashion, the substitutionary violence has a unifying effect. Antagonism against immigrants has the beneficial effect of making the masses more united around their country’s flag. The rich can find relief in that the newcomers are too uninformed – they barely know the language! – to pose a revolutionary threat. Moreover, the immigrants can make even the rich more patriotic. The rich can take on the patronising role of saving the immigrants from their old-country misfortune, giving them economic opportunities and initiating them into the higher civilisation of their new homeland. In the process, the new country comes out as a paragon of all things good: freedom, prosperity, justice. The rich are once again perceived as external models, admired but unreachable, both in the eyes of the immigrants, and indirectly, in the eyes of the incumbent masses stung with renewed patriotic zeal.
René Girard has argued that man first domesticated animals in order to have sacrificial victims ready at hand. Immigrants, as “the other” brought into the midst society, may play an evolved, bloodless mutation of this role. By providing a new target of resentment for the disgruntled masses, and a new pet for the privileged, the immigrants distract both factions from fighting each other, while increasing the value of national culture in everyone’s eyes. As a consequence, immigrants themselves mimetically strive for the national ideal, boosting it further.
United around the national idea, validated by immigrants, various classes of a powerful western democracy can unite in their nation’s global empire building. Whatever foreign land is the target of geopolitical ambition, the state can import immigrants from there and, by throwing them in the mimetic meat grinder of the home country, make of them advocates of their new homeland in their old one. This is at the heart of the strategy that has been derisively called “invade the world, invite the world”. It should be a win-win strategy - at least in theory.
Like all sacrificial mechanisms, the use of immigration to stymie internal conflict tends to attenuate in effectiveness even as it increases in intensity. Many Western countries have reached a point where immigration has become commonplace while losing its effectiveness as political tool.
For one thing, the sheer number of immigrants has allowed them to create their own societies within the host society. Freed from the need to assimilate, immigrants are no longer suitable as champions to either progressive or conservative causes within their host culture. The hosts are now finding themselves in the positions of competing for immigrant favour, often in the form of competing in cultural openness and tolerance. In the attempt to win immigrants over to their original progressive or conservative causes, they find themselves now serving completely new causes – those of immigrant groups themselves! The market for ideological acolytes has become a buyer’s market. Those in Western democracies who still believe that immigrants will be assimilated to twentieth-century Western ideals, in this era of identity politics and political correctness, now appear as suffering from delusions of grandeur.
When a lover is spurned, when his narcissistic tactic of attracting admiration of others fails, he may lash out against the ones he had tried to woo. Since he could not convince them of his own transcendence, he is going to mock their own wretchedness. In Europe, this backlash can be seen, I believe, in the penchant in some countries for drawing cartoons of prophet Mohammad and generally offending Islam in some other crass manner. Besides that, there is in every western country that particular sort of chauvinism that mocks immigrants in a way that reveals an obsession with them, or a frustration over their failure to appreciate the host culture, a bitterness over failed imperialism.
The battle for the hearts and minds of immigrants is all but lost, and today’s Western politicians are left to battle merely for their votes. They don’t know nor care how the cultural landscape of their homelands will change over the coming decades, but they do care about staying in power for another term. Yet, even when it comes to the binary process of voting, immigrants are proving to be an unwieldy bunch. They are somewhat like political Schrodinger’s cats: it is impossible to predict whether they will take up struggle against their new country’s conservative powers, because such powers are naturally excluding of newcomers, or against the progressives, because their original cultures are far less progressive than that of the West.
While a few decades ago immigration served both sides of Western politics, today it has become a political force in its own right. However things work out in the future, it is certain that today immigration in the West has lost its sacrificial effectiveness.
Outside of the West, global powers such as China, Russia, India, or Japan have never used immigration in nation building as outlined above. They have other options. The majority of world’s countries today still base their national identities around more or less petty squabbling and warfare with their neighbours, and if not that, then on even lower forms of conflict like tribal warfare or blood feuds. Petty conflicts provide sufficient supply of scapegoats to generate unanimous aggression and through it, social cohesion. They may preserve national identities, but they block the road to the heights of development currently enjoyed in the West. Indeed, many in the West fear that mass immigration may fragment their societies to such an extent that tribal warfare will infect western countries themselves, and take them backward in civilisational progress.
There are some exceptions, outside of the West, to unity through ethnic conflict. For example, China has generated national unity through mission for economic development, and perhaps after that, it can maintain it through peaceful cultural differentiation. Yet, even China, and its Asian neighbours, are susceptible to dangerous nationalistic flareups over island or border disputes or historical grievances.
So far, only Western empires have sought to unite the whole world, inspired by the original catholic spirit of European culture, and it is this universalist spirit that also inspired immigration. Non-western empires at most tend to stake claims on certain geopolitical spheres of influence, and see themselves as nation-states rather than “idea-states”. The jury is out as to whether the West will come up with another universalist model of statehood, or whether less open models will exert their own influence.
Read more in the book Catharses.