René Girard XX: Idol Worship
The text below is an old draft of an excerpt from the book Catharses.
The archaic scapegoat that is sacrificed and then deified does not only act through his negative energies of fear and enforcement of rules. He becomes an object of ultimate awe that is worship, the highest model of love and beauty among the faithful. The divinity is mysterious, and this too adds to the awe, for once we can explain something, we are halfway to mastering it. “To understand is to equal," says Raphael, the artist of the Renaissance, the first modern movement of imitating the creation. Yet, what worth is a model that we can master? – there can be no transcendence there.
Recognition of an almighty mediator of our desires in heaven reduces conflictual mediation on earth. We will still desire earthly things, but the ultimate transcendence is reserved for God, and with that, we can look on things down here on earth with less despair, and on people of this earth with less rivalry and more compassion. Life is short, physical beauty is fleeting, and all pursuit is chasing after the wind. Faith brings a special sort of peace of God, the shalom or salaam that puts us at peace with the world because through contemplation of something higher than the world, we can ourselves rise above the world and look at it with a healthy degree of disinterest, a calm that further creates the wonderful side-effect of clearing our minds of passions.
Devotional verse is replete with celebration of such peace. The Book of Ecclesiastes is an elegy to the vanity of this world and a dithyramb to the “fear of God," which is “the root of all wisdom.” Anyone spiritual can relate to the words in the Epistle of James: “For no sooner has the sun risen with a burning heat than it withers the grass; its flower falls, and its beautiful appearance perishes. So, the rich man also will fade away in his pursuits.” (James 1:11)
Disturbing things start to happen once the ultimate mediator of desire is removed from heaven, and once indeed heaven itself is abolished. In a primitive society, where all rules are sacred, there would be a more immediate disaster of a breakdown of social order. Such a society is by definition non-policed, and in addition to whatever innate “conscience” there may be, dread of supernatural punishment is a critical external brake on violation of social rules, all of which are sacred.
In a more developed society, one in which a system of laws has become rationalized and enforceable by a state, and to that extent de-sacralized, and in which an individual might act by higher-order codes such as philosophy or morality, abolition of the divine brings about disorder in a more round-about way, not through fear of immediate divine punishment, but through loss of positive divine mediation. Bent out of the straight vertical line that shoots into heaven, the highest transcendence becomes, in Girard’s words, deviated – it lands on someone here on earth. As a consequence, it also becomes internal, meaning that our mediators can become our rivals.
Idols that walk the earth are too close to their devotees, and even though they may not be rivals to the lowliest among them, they will be close enough to some other humans and come into conflict with them. Some Führer or Great Leader may be a god to a mass of patriots within his own country, but he will be a devil to those in other countries, or to his political rivals at home. The chain of rivalry spreads from top to bottom, and deviated transcendence never fails to be marked by strife, which leads to violence.
The humanist doctrines that ignore the mimetic nature of desire fail to understand the peculiar necessity of human beings to have a model (or “mediator”) for it. They don’t quite buy Chesterton’s claim that “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything.” The human in this view looks pathetic, needy; he looks like a sadomasochistic bottom who cannot live without a dominant master. Yet, the work of René Girard provides a compelling argument that this is not far from the truth. We cannot desire without having someone to tell us what to desire, and as we desire a whole lot, we require a mediator who is far above us. And if you are going to have to pick a master, Dominus is much better than a dominatrix.
An argument from pathos against belief in God is that there is shame to being a slave to an almighty, all-controlling master. This argument may hold some water, I suppose, if by getting rid of God we no longer had masters, but this is not the case. We merely find another master and treat him with the same abject subservience that, in the imagination of many moderns, one shows towards an old-school god. We want a god because we want the ultimate transcendence, and the more we lower our subservience, the higher we raise our idol – this lowering is all we can do for our part to contribute to the glory of our precious deity. We cannot raise the idol into heaven, but we can increase their height relative to us by lowering ourselves into a Dostoyevskian underground, as mapped out by Girard. By bringing our idol from heaven to earth, we don’t abolish heaven, we merely lower our standards for it. In the words of Girard:
“But as the gods are pulled down from heaven the sacred flows over the earth; it separates the individual from all earthly goods; it creates a gulf between him and the world of [down here] far greater than that which used to separate him from the [beyond]. The earth's surface where Others live becomes an inaccessible paradise.” (Deceit, Desire and the Novel, “Men Become Gods)
Girard’s even deeper insight in this powerful passage is that the separation we felt from the divine increases rather than decreases as our models come down to earth. This is not because the metaphysical distance has increased – it has decreased – but because unlike a god in heaven, the idols of this earth end up acting mean. They are engaged in mimetic strife against others, just like the rest of us, and the closer you get to them, the meaner they act towards you. They are after power, and whatever comes under their control or possession rises above the reach of us mere mortals. Thus, they “separate [us] from all earthy goods." The idols feel threatened by rivals, and they lash out. If you get too close to them, you just might find them altogether selfish and cruel. This invariably happens when a cult runs its course: there is a scandal with the founder.
Like all things of the earth, the earthly idols are in the process of dying, and if by no one else, they are threatened by death, and they lurch against it and towards life in desperation, not in peace. They lurch frantically, against reason, which tells them that the last and true end of all things is death.
Who are these idols? A modern reader may ask, not understanding how his secular lifestyle has anything to do with the bronze-age concept of idol worship. The beam of ultimate transcendence cannot be shut off – once it is bent down from heaven, it must be shone on something here on earth. One needs a purpose in life, the ultimate pursuit, and whatever that is, it becomes one’s idol. There is a classical enumeration that corresponds to seven deadly sins and includes personifications like Mammon; collectivists of the previous century often idolized their nation, and gave ultimate obeisance to their political leader; today, there are many who put their faith in idols that go by the name of “science” or “social justice” (falsely so-called), or some other political cause; or a thousand little demons of consumerism. On social media, one can find almost non-ironic words of worship directed to scantily clad bodies or entrepreneurs. Even “doing the right thing” or “being a good citizen” or “making a difference” can be a pursuit of deviated transcendence.
The secular reader now asks: What would life be like if we forsook earning money, or spending it, or political engagement, or science and technology, or sex? It would not be much of a life, it is true, but the choice here is not between embracing or forsaking, but between controlling or being controlled. Anchored to a truly divine transcendence in (some vision of) heaven, we can properly guide our earthly appetites. We can enjoy the pleasures of this earth, give thanks to them, and move on. In contrast, once a cause is made ultimate, its consummation would rob us of the transcendent, and our lives would become empty. This is why all causes pursued with what can ironically be called “religious fervour” have no end in sight – neither getting richer, nor scientific progress, nor sexual pursuits, nor social justice, nor any zealous political program. Nor, for that matter, art for the sake of art.
Life teaches us that to accomplish our goals, we need to approach the task at hand with confidence, with mastery. Yet, by imbuing our goals with transcendence, we become invested in failing at them, lest we arrive at the destination and find that it too, is not heaven. The fin of the captive Orca is bent down from heaven, and like the captive whale, those pursuing deviated transcendence can move only in circles. They have picked a destination that may just be reachable, that may indeed be much closer than they initially thought, but they dare not transgress the sacred boundary. So, they turn back. They return eternally, as Nietzsche would say. They end up worshipping the circle.
For some pursuits, it is quite easy to see how obsession leads to some form or other of masochism. In sexual pursuit, for example, excessive obsession with potential lovers often leads to crippling impotence and a sense of sexual worthlessness. This phenomenon is often exploited in coming-of-age comedies about teenage boys who neglect the inner-city proverb against putting a certain something on a pedestal. A person obsessed with money can descend into the pits of victimhood of snake oil salesmen and various types of get-rich-quick schemes, including multi-level marketing, pyramid schemes, or stock market speculations. For the over-zealous scholars, there are a plethora of pathways in pseudo-science.
However, for every masochist there must be a sadist; Hegel’s master-slave dynamic needs two. The ratio does not have to be one-to-one, however; a single master can sway a multitude of slaves - his great following will validate his false transcendence. To comprehend the story of the person who becomes the sadist – the master – it is critical to invoke Girard’s interpretation of him as not a true master, but merely as another slave who role-plays the master. There can be no true master precisely because the transcendence is false, or at least, there are no provable reports of anyone arriving at the Garden of Eden of that particular desire. So, one of the despairing pursuers volunteers, as it were, to pretend that he has arrived, and thereby do the rest of them a favour of validating their faith.
Alternative to transcendence is the existential void, which is unbearable, so both the slaves and their master can bend their credulity to incredible degrees to convince themselves that transcendence really is there. If nothing else, the transcendence will be built – worship paid to it becomes proof in itself; the master is crowned and enthroned and his followers shower him with material tribute. He becomes powerful and he commands consensus of multitudes. The emperor is clothed with this consensus, if with nothing else.
The rise and anointing of the master do not happen wholly haphazardly. Every false transcendence is built on top of true art, and to channel the false transcendence, a master must be a most skilled artist. But he must go beyond that, he must overstep a certain moral and spiritual boundary: to be effective in his role as the false prophet, he must sound the psychological depths of his flock, behold the truth of their spiritual despair and drift, and, on the other hand, he must behold the great lie of their pursuit – and he must finally embrace the lie. And why would he embrace the lie, but for earthly glory?
Here is Doctor Faustus, who has contracted his science out to the Devil, and who has the busy Mephistopheles act as his strategic advisor. He knows every weakness of his flock, for he was once one of them, a slave in that same Egypt, and he will henceforth feed those weaknesses with the manna of false transcendence and lead his flock to the Promised Land, even to the Garden of Eden, to which he is now the pontifex.
Examples of these Fausti run the whole gamut from run-of-the-mill leaders of spiritualist cults such as often found on the West Coast of the U.S.A., like Scientologists or the type depicted in the documentary film Wild Wild Country, to nowadays quite old-fashioned authoritarian political figureheads, less old-fashioned figureheads of zealous social causes, to perhaps the most successful and respectable of them all, the increasingly resented Silicon Valley Founders.
To attack champions of technological progress is sacrilegious. But we are not attacking technological progress itself, but only the false transcendence with which it is increasingly sold. Against it, we indeed are sacrilegious. Endowing science with a transcendence that does not rightfully belong to it retards the advancement of science proper because it generates the sadomasochistic dynamic outlined above: once science is hollowed, there is a pious psychological impulse not to understand it. This dual drive to both respect science and to mystify it can be seen in today’s society.
In the United States, there has been a long-acknowledged talent gap in STEM professions. [1] This gap is increasingly rising as domestic students show ever less interest in scientific study. The job vacancies and university admissions are increasingly filled by immigrants. Captains of STEM industries in the country often bewail this state of affairs and look for ways to inspire the younger generations to join the technical fields. Yet the technology they produce is promoted in a way that, in order to attract consumers, presents it as imbued with transcendence, and therefore mystery. We are no longer dealing with gadgets that make life more convenient; in the most progressive countries, we are not even dealing with gadgets that strengthen our nation – that seems a bit too fashy [2] – we are dealing with means to reach a higher plane of existence. The STEM industry is ridden with terms of false transcendence: Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Big Data, Hyperconnectivity, Disruption, Singularity.
That such veneration of technology would inspire technological work among the devout is belied by the gap between fascination with science, attested in the United States by the great popularity of science fiction, concurrent with the low interest in actually studying (the non-fictional) science. The dynamic of false transcendence we outlined above suggests that a better explanation is that we shy away from things that edify us. Yet the edification of technology continues because if not workers, it attracts investors and customers. In general, it is a power move.
Would not a similar argument apply to other avenues of false transcendence? Consider the political one. A strongman whips up patriotism, which like love of technology, is not a bad sentiment in and of itself. However, he whips it up to a feverish pitch, where love of country becomes a form of false transcendence. The worshippers are now in awe of their deity, they bring it sacrificial offerings in the form of battlefield deaths or workplace overwork, and they yield their judgement to the high priest. The strongman rises higher, and the patriots sink lower. Eventually, the strongman becomes someone who always knows best, his moves are always justified, and the patriots are asked for even greater sacrifices. The end result is that the strongman becomes more exploitative while the citizens become more idiotic. Deviated transcendence always seems to require us to become stupider. Life becomes hell as political sadomasochism dominates the livelihoods of citizens and torments their psyches. Watch TV in more corrupt countries and you can see common themes of corruption and disturbing caricatures of callous privilege. But this is only dramatic catharsis – the real-life cult continues together with its characteristic exploitation.
In concession, because we do not live in a perfect world, a qualified deviation of transcendence onto an earthly target can have provisional value. To children, the entire adult world is transcendent, and there may be a useful pedagogical tool in building transcendental appeal among young students for pursuits such as science, art, or entrepreneurship. Another example is monarchy: as the wrath of God upon a lawless society can often be quite delayed, it may be expedient to place citizens under oath to the more immanent authority of a monarch, with whom also there can be no rivalry.
The modern era has proposed a third option between explicitly vertical and deviated transcendence, and it has gone by a somewhat loose name of agnosticism. Here, we are talking specifically about agnosticism of desire, if you will, but it is probably correlated to the attitude conventionally meant by the term. Some people would rather not get too excited either by things on this earth or by things in heaven. Many of us can relate to the lifestyle because it is widespread in our non-dogmatic world, and it seems to me that everyone partakes of the agnostic spirit at least in some moments or on some questions. The lifestyle may revolve on focus on family, for example, or choose to be perpetually distracted by the dainty small things in life. Or it may lean on embracing dispassionate pursuit of philosophy, art or science; one may become a stoic, an abstract painter perhaps, or an empiricist.
Yet, I don’t think this spiritual state can last, and it cannot last because humans are beings who desire transcendence. It is too lonely to stumble through faceless doctrines, or no doctrines at all, and sooner or later the soul latches on to some positive vision of transcendence, however true or false, onto a vision that instead of isolating us, promises to bring us into a great communion.
This essay has employed a great amount of religious terminology and metaphors. This may lead a reader to point out that the pitfalls of idol worship we outlined would apply not just to facets of modern lifestyle, but to any old religion. Besides, who after all is to decide between the right and the wrong religion anyway? The question is a classic theological one, but it has been relevant even in secular and legal discourse when it comes to drawing a line between legitimate religions and harmful cults, which should be outlawed.
The distinction has been successfully made, and my simple summary here will be that bad religions ultimately cause measurable material harm to their followers. We shall indeed tell them by their fruits, though unfortunately those fruits often take a long time to show ripen. The idol of false transcendence stands with its palms open, asking you to give, while true transcendence bestows gifts. The judgement based on such distinction seems right to me, but it is not on me to judge with it any particular case, and including any particular congregations of the great world religions. I would say that in the light of such distinction the first three of the Ten Commandments can be read universally: we should recognize the source of true transcendence, we should not pursue false transcendences, and we should not conflate the first with the second.
Read more in the book Catharses.
halhefner.com
[1] https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/02/americas-stem-crisis-threatens-our-national-security/
[2] I would hypothesize that among domestic U.S. students who still fill STEM gaps, a large proportion would be inspired by patriotic duty, as is common in every other country.