René Girard VIII: Social Science as Scapegoating Mechanism
The text below is an old draft of an excerpt from the book Catharses.
Social sciences began in earnest in the nineteenth century. Several competing doctrines developed that tried to reduce social life to a ruling principle, much like natural scientists were reducing physical phenomena to physics equations. Karl Marx saw class struggle as the primary force of human society. To Marx, other human endeavours - religion, tradition, warfare, art, science, philosophy – are mere weapons in the class struggle. Religion is said to be an invention for reconciling economic losers with their misery, art signals socio-economic status, and so on. Social Darwinism saw man as struggling to multiply his genes. Then there was nationalism, the ideology that loyalty to the nation and struggle for its prestige are man’s highest duties. Then there were various forms of liberalism or individualism, which saw the essence of man in his desire to achieve personal freedom through social contract.
Since modern doctrines seek out causes of social ills, they constitute the modern analogue of casting out the devil, or the scapegoating mechanisms. Where they differ from older methods of exorcism is that they look to cast out bad ideas, rather than bad persons. Social science, like natural science, can only deal with deterministic objects and patterns. It would fix society like it would fix a machine. In contrast, from archaic to modern times, religion believes in evil as a force that ultimately has no deterministic cause. Religion sees society as made up of unpredictable persons.
In his book The Rule of Man (Le Regne De L’Homme), Remi Brague explains how modern man, in his quest for ontological independence, has become both the great experimentalist and the experimental object. Man is to be both the master of his fate and a programmable object of scientific experiment and manipulation. Mimetic theory can explain how the objectification of man is part and parcel of the modern obsession with objects in general. It postulates a triangle of desire: the desiring subject, then a mediator or “model” whose desire is copied by the subject, and finally the object of desire. As Brague argues, modernity’s foundational assumption is that man is independent, which means that his desires are authentic, which in turn means that the objects of his desire have intrinsic value.
The strategy for resolving mimetic conflict then becomes not to make peace between the subject and the mediator of desire, as it was of old, but to multiply or modify the object. “My model and I,” thinks the modern man, “will get along just fine, if only we fix the object that is causing us to quarrel." If it is a consumer good, the modern man seeks to multiply it; if it is a social system, he seeks to reform it. The subject and mediator are to cease focusing on one another and instead focus on fixing the common object of their desire. As a consequence of this modern obsession with objects, if a pre-modern man time-travelled to the present, his first shock would be the plethora of manufactured objects surrounding every setting of everyday life.
Science and technology as products of modernity are concerned with creating and manipulating objects. To study man, social science must make an object out of him, too. To the degree that man is an object of scientific enquiry, he must be reducible to predictable patterns. Then, policies can be devised to liberate good patterns and eliminate bad ones. The internal logic of deterministic doctrines is often hard to question, for it tends to be built by intelligent men with hard bricks of reason. Yet they built them on shifting sands of bad assumptions. The assumption that man is primarily an economical creature is a bad one, as is the one about him being primarily nationalistic, or Darwinian. The scientific spirit cannot resist the temptation to reduce man, and in his vanity, he will deny the error of the simplistic assumptions that make of his doctrine a new prophecy showing the way to salvation.
Yet, sometimes we may sympathize with the ideologues of social sciences. We can appreciate that the appeal of predictability and control was greater at a time when human knowledge was limited and as a consequence, the world was a scarier place. Also, a lot of times one doctrine is a reaction to another. Communism is a reaction to capitalism; pacifism is a reaction to nationalism; atheism is a reaction to religious fundamentalism, and so on. Prescription of one doctrine may be a good medicine against the ills of another. Yet what ends up happening in the big picture is that society begins to swing wildly from one side to another, and men bounce from one extreme to the next. We end up with a modern society that suffers from bipolar disorder, which seems to have progressed to some kind of split personality in the early twenty-first century.
Early romantics of the nineteenth century felt the psychological strains of the modern era. As the deterministic spirit of the scientific revolution moved from deciphering nature to deciphering man, many felt uncomfortable under the glaring beam of the rationalistic microscope pointing over their heads. They would not answer the deterministic doctrines of man with reason, because it seemed that reason is the very weapon by which science was going to reduce men to lab rats to be trained and conditioned to perfection. Instead, the romantics resorted to elevating the emotional, the irrational, and the suffering aspects of existence as that which allows man to escape from under the microscope of determinism and become free. Many romantics took up the suffering and the pathetic aspects of the story of Jesus Christ as an inspiration in their battle against rationalism.
This wild swinging from one doctrine to another, and running to and from rationalism, was captured by G.K. Chesterton with uncanny wit:
“The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum; that is the idea that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other. It is a shameful and even shocking fancy; it is the denial of the whole dignity of mankind. When Man is alive he stands still. It is only when he is dead that he swings.”
Chesterton knew that the romantic fight against reductive doctrines of man was never going to lead to victory. As long as the romantic forfeited the fight on the battlefields of reason, the doctrines were going to expand and take power in society. It would take a whole new crop of thinkers in the West to tackle deterministic doctrines, not through an appeal to emotion, but to reason. They would show that the religious and classical traditions possess the arguments to defeat the new deterministic doctrines. Chesterton was one of the great names in this struggle. René Girard was another.
Girard’s mimetic theory, at first sight, may appear to be just another deterministic doctrine. It appears to reduce all aspects of human experience to the imitation of the desires of others. It seems to suggest that humans could be modelled as automatons that will imitate whatever is placed on an appropriate pedestal. If this is the case, we could devise a policy that controls role models to ensure society goes in the desirable direction.
However, mimetic theory, like religion which it ended up defending, does not have much to say about policy. If there’s a firm conclusion in mimetic theory, it is the Christian conclusion that we are inevitably heading for the Apocalypse. Mimetic theory rejects objects as essential to human desire. If one posits inequality in material wealth as the root of all conflict, as socialists do, one is confounded to find that removing the conventional measure of wealth merely gives rise to another currency. Fiat money is replaced by an accumulation of party influence. The royal court is replaced by the senate. The social contract does not yield to a rational balancing of interests. Prohibitions on environmental pollution cannot eliminate pollution of mimetic strife.
Once a revolution or a “paradigm shift” has changed a system of values, general desire will shift from the old models to new ones. But no matter what or who the new models are, they are subject to the same mimetic forces that caused the previous social crisis. If mercantilism is now frowned upon but patriotism is valued, then patriotism becomes the new object of vanity and ambition. It will generate rivalries and resentment just like mercantilism had. When piety becomes respectable, you get anti-popes or witch trials. When patriotism becomes respectable, Samuel Johnson calls it “the last resort of a scoundrel." Satan himself, like the respectable gentleman of Bulgakov’s fiction, seeks membership only in the most respectable clubs. He wouldn’t be interested in joining the Church of Satan, something that the members of this church, the true modern objectivists that they are, seem to fail to grasp.
Even the wisest political edifices cannot provide for the absolute unpredictability of human desire, rivalry, and vice that can rot them out. To Benjamin Franklin, the United States of America that he helped constitute was a “republic, if you can keep it.” Yet, in modern America, many believe that their political system has built-in algorithms that will defend it against all corruption. They ascribe to the Constitution the status of inerrant scripture, and the almost magical property of being capable of inducing utopia, if only it were obeyed. But mimetic desire can attach itself to the ideals of the constitution as well, generate rivalries among its disciples, and ultimately lead to resentment and accusations. If William Shakespeare is right and the Devil can quote scriptures to justify his ends, then he can also quote the Constitution.
No political system or social group is immune to mimetic contagion. Giving the assumption of righteousness to a person based on their social position is the definition of naïveté. Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it nicely:
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
The devil that deterministic societies seek to cast out is no less shifty than the devil of traditional scapegoating mechanisms. A society achieves a temporary peace in the aftermath of a cathartic revolution only to watch the same old demons of humanity again spread through different channels. Modernity rightly sees religious scapegoating as irrational and unjust, but it too fails to solve the problem of evil because it always takes the devil to be an impersonal entity, a faulty social arrangement. Yet, religion and mimetic theory are the ones who have it right in claiming that evil stems from the person and not the object. It stems from desire, which easily detaches from one object and attaches to another, led in doing so through imitation of the other person, the mediator.
In contrast to the modern, algorithmic approach to rooting out evil, pre-modern religion is personal. It has no faith in objects as solutions to suffering. It has no faith in persons either, but rather its hope resides in establishing the right relationship between persons. The ancients had a profound fear of human nature, and they could only overcome it through fear of God. Being less policed, ancient societies had less use for moralizing. Instead, they deployed sacrificial rituals to channel collective violence upon arbitrary victims. The ritual was a wholly utilitarian solution.
The ancient ambivalence towards good and evil appeared to Nietzsche as an arrogant rising above good and evil, a going beyond it. But the reality is that the ancients were kept below any objective system of ethics. We the moderns still fall short of it, and still need sacrifice. Our human nature is still fallen.
Read more in the book Catharses.