René Girard V: Violence and Levels of Civilisation
The text below is an old draft of an excerpt from the book Catharses.
The conventional way to measure a civilization has been to look at its technological development. At least it was before political correctness made passing such judgments inappropriate. René Girard’s mimetic theory gives us another way to grade a culture. It is less exact than looking at their technology, but if correct, it would be more profound.
Girard considers the resolution of a mimetic crisis, or an all-versus-all outbreak of violence, through a collective murder of an arbitrary victim – the scapegoat – as the foundational event of all civilization. The simultaneous commemoration and dissimulation of this murder through the ritual of sacrifice, the ancestor of all rituals down to our times, is the mechanism for maintaining order. To Girard, the victimary mechanism of channelling unavoidable internecine violence among humans has been the only way to manage violence and keep a permanent collective. The degree to which a society manages violence measures the degree of its civilization.
Collective peace afforded by the channelling of violence through sacrifice enables harmony needed for the flourishing of technology, arts, or commerce. The system for ensuring peace is therefore the sacrificial and later the religious system. If effective, this system unlocks human creative potential and gives rise to progress. If not, the society degenerates into chaotic strife that leads to its collapse.
Management of violence is upstream of technology. Gauging how successful a society is at managing violence is less precise than measuring its technology, which can be fairly measured by empirical data on economic productivity, gross domestic product, etc. While there are variables like crime and war statistics that can measure open violence, mimetic violence, which should, in theory, include the general levels of resentment, bad faith, abusive and self-destructive behaviour, etc., would be much more difficult if not impossible to quantify. But getting an accurate sense of the level of mimetic violence in a society would have stronger predictive powers with regards to the future of that society. This is especially true in our times, when many are losing faith in technology as the foundation of civilization and guarantor of well-being.
While it may be hard to do to the standards of modern sociology, describing the level to which a society manages violence can be accomplished in broad strokes if we zoom out and look at the widest historical and anthropological perspective. At the lowest level, the least complex societies merely manage to keep violence outside a small in-group size of approximately a village. Such was the case with the colonial-era Amazonian Tupinamba society as described in Girard’s book Violence and the Sacred.[i] Within a village there is harmony, but between villages reigns perpetual war, ritualized through violent customs including cannibalism of enemy captives. If one envisions violence as subject to cycles of tension that are periodically released through the unanimous murder of a victim, then the Tupinamba cycle was very short. Periodic rises in mimetic tension required a frequent feed of enemy blood to keep the village united.
Cultural complexity is not possible in such an environment. There is no opportunity for large-scale organization and planning of the sort that in ancient Egypt gave birth to mathematics and astronomy. In Egypt, there was the environmental pressure of the flooding of the Nile, which required cooperative annual planning. In the Amazon, there are no such pressures to override the innate human tendency for conflict. Large organizations give rise to a complexity that gives rise to the specialization of labour, the arts, and leisure. In a society preoccupied with violence at such a low level, only the most basic forms of collaboration are possible. No sooner does a community grow in size than a violent conflict splits it apart. Mirroring such a primitive state of organization, such societies produce only the most primitive forms of technology, dress, or language. Such societies have a short cycle of violence; that is, the time from one violent outbreak to the next is short.
Girard describes a stark example of a culture reduced by violence to a bare minimum of continuity in Kaingang Indians of Santa Katarina, Brazil, in the first half of the twentieth century.[ii] At that time the Kaingang were moved to a reservation and, for whatever historical reason, were reduced to a state of “extreme poverty … on a religious as well as a technological level.” Jules Henry, the American anthropologists who observed them, attributed the dysfunction to endless blood feuds which, he wrote, “cleaved the society asunder like a deadly axe, blighting its life like the plague.” In Girard’s interpretation, the Kaingang were living in a state of perpetual sacrificial crisis. They obsessed over feuds at the expense of any productive endeavour. Henry writes: “Their absorbed interest in the history of their own destruction has impressed on their minds with flawless clarity the multitudinous cross-workings of feuds.”
While violence raged between small groups, within a single group the Kaingang showed a high level of tolerance, putting up with even the most inflammatory offences, such as adultery, which if committed across group boundaries would instigate an immediate bloody reprisal. Those small groups were the only remaining zone of precious peace. Yet a group would inevitably grow bigger and an offence within it would cause it to split. The level of violence was too much for anything beyond a marauding gang.
One may go up from such a petty and chaotic level of conflict in smaller or larger steps, and in an order that may or may not be chronological. The archeological record is not conclusive. Before the first large-scale civilizations appeared in the Middle East, it seems that an intermediate level of civilization persisted for thousands of years. These archaic civilizations had larger cycles of violence than the Kiangang and the Tupinamba. With them, warfare was between city-states or coalitions of tribes against one another, rather than between single groups or villages. War on a larger scale retains its sacrificial function of unifying a group against a common enemy, but larger, more complex societies need peacetime to develop, which means that they need to have less frequent war. During times of peace, they need to discharge internecine mimetic violence upon victims other than the inhabitants of the neighbouring village. Such a victim could be no other than the sacrificial victim. Seasonal sacrificial rituals diffused violence that pent up in cycles and each time threatened to break out into petty conflict. Yet, they too could not remove the thirst for war altogether.
Modern humanistic theories on the origin of civilization make the struggle for resources the central object of early warfare. It stands to reason that a society pushed to the edge of peril by famine will strike out in conquest for territory before a mimetic crisis has a chance to develop. However, based on the irrationality of war that is so abundantly attested by the historical record, and based on the well-documented ritual character of early warfare, it seems that in the prehistoric era too the most common causes of war were not economic. Mimetic theory states that these causes ultimately grow from mimetic crises.
If we picture a tribe somewhere in the bronze or early iron age, we should imagine that sacrificial rituals are central to their religion. Sacrifice was universal across all humanity. We should also picture that such sacrifices were offered to gods so that they, for reasons that vary according to different mythologies, would withhold their wrath from society. When such wrath is recounted in myth, it is always a general and indiscriminate disaster, be it a flood, a plague, or a drought. It vexes the morals of a modern observer that such divine punishments are collective, that they afflict both the good and the evil. Girard’s theory offers the answer that such disasters are nothing but mythological code for mimetic breakdowns. The nature of mimetic conflict is that it is contagious because mimesis is contagious. Objects of desire of two rivals will soon have a third rival, and the spirit of strife and rivalry ultimately spreads to the entire society. Girard would probably argue that the fire and brimstone that descended up Sodom and Gomorrah were an allegory for the chaos of citizens going at each other’s throats and destroying their city in a bloody crescendo of internecine conflict.
Sacrifices were truly effective against staving off disaster because they channelled mimetic violence pent up within a community. Ritual sacrifice allowed the populace to channel what was essentially their resentment of their neighbour onto the sacrificial victim. This mechanism worked only as long as the participants were unaware of the truth behind it. The channelling of violence would not be possible if they were aware that the sacrifices are “fake” replacements.
But what happens when and if sacrifices begin to lose their efficacy?
This may happen for different reasons. One way is for sacrifices to become polluted. Religion refers to sacrificial blood as cleansing. On the other hand, blood spilt in what Girard calls “reciprocal” violence of one citizen against another is considered unclean – and contagious. For sacrifices to be effective, it was of utmost importance to create powerful boundaries between sacrificial blood and the violence of the outside world. Physically, such boundaries took the forms of hallowed grounds, holy temples, altars, high places, and such. They involved intricate cleansing rituals for priests involved in the sacrifice. Physical separation reflected the notion that reciprocal, “tit-for-tat” aggression that one encounters in daily life is unclean, banal, while the unanimous violence of the community against a singular and clearly labelled victim is purifying and holy. It is purifying precisely because it purges unclean violence.
Sacrifice becomes polluted when the sacrificial blood becomes mixed with the blood of reciprocal strife. How can this happen? The priests officiating the sacrifice may not be properly purified. This would mean that the slaughtering hand of the priest no longer properly represents the unanimous violence of the whole community. Perhaps the priest, or the entire priestly class, has become corrupt. In their capacity as priests or judges, they may take sides in the reciprocal struggle within the community. As such, they now cannot represent the entire community, and the violence enacted by them upon the sacrificial victim begins to be perceived as reciprocal. The priest is no longer propitiating a god in heaven; rather, like an alpha male among the beasts, he is showcasing his personal power in the face of his earthy enemies.
Loss of piety means that sacrifices have become ineffective. Through to our times, societies have feared that loss of piety will cause unrest and bring disaster upon the community. In girardian interpretation, all “loss of piety” can be traced to the phenomenon in which the substitution of sacrificial victim for the original victim of collective violence no longer works. We mentioned above that the sacrificial mechanism works only if the collective truly believes that the sacrificial victim does have the power to take away their sins. Once the people begin to think of the ritual as a ruse, it loses its effectiveness.
Modern atheism could agree that ritual could be an effective psychological trick to abate violence. But modern atheists tend to be humanists, believing that no deity is necessary to keep peace among men. Girard would disagree: without the victimary mechanism, due to the mimetic apparatus of the human nervous system, humans will inevitably descend into chaotic violence. Humans need the fear of a higher power for the very practical purpose of avoiding self-destruction.
No matter how the effectiveness of sacrifice deteriorates, the result is social unrest. The sacrificial victim whose blood is no longer effective in bringing about harmony will need a replacement. The external enemy in war is the perfect substitute. War, then, is the sacrificial ritual of last resort for civilizations whose institutionalized rituals have lost their peace-bringing efficacy.[iii] For “uncivilized” tribes, war is the primary sacrificial ritual.
Coalitions of ancient tribes on all continents engaged in constant warfare. If the rationalistic hypothesis about economic motivations was correct, one should expect that such wars would involve more negotiation. A perfectly rational war should be nothing other than the “war by algebra” of Clausewitz.[iv] Yet, as we explore the spirit of war, and especially pre-modern war, we can clearly distinguish a religious and sacrificial element in it. There are gods of war, there are heavens for warriors. There is a religious zeal for war closely linked with the well-being of the community and individual souls. A cursory look at mythologies of Indo-European or Native American tribes reveals a lot of worship surrounding war. On the other hand, there are no mythologies citing economic reasons. Economics may be boring, but really, there aren’t even any economic reasons anyone can detect dissimulated behind mythological narratives.
A study of the old American continent can furnish further evidence for the link between violence and levels of civilization. In pre-Columbian America, we find two modes of existence: the tribal, mostly nomadic mode of the tribes living in the temperate north, and the highly centralized mode of the subtropical civilizations of the Aztecs, the Mayas, and Incas. We find that the higher civilizational level of the three settled and stratified cultures was accompanied by a much higher emphasis on ritual sacrifice, namely the famous human sacrifice.[v] For these civilizations, the channelling of violence through controlled, though gory, rituals of sacrifice was sufficient to stave off mimetic crises. As a result, the Aztecs, the Mayas and the Incas did not need inter-tribal warfare to provide additional channels, and they could unite into one large and complex society.
On the other hand, for North American tribes, war was sacrifice. War had the beneficial effect of deflecting violence between smaller groups within the same coalition onto an external enemy. It thus represented progress in comparison to the village-level warfare of the Kaingang and the Tupinamba and allowed for higher development of culture. However, the northern American tribes had shorter cycles of violence than did the settled cultures of to their south. This meant that their cooperative growth was always shorter, never advancing beyond the level of sparse tribal coalitions, and thus never engendering complex cultural structures. At the price of profuse sacrificial blood, the Aztecs, the Mayas, and the Incas extended the cycles of violence, enabling their civilization to grow in size and complexity for longer periods.
All great ancient civilizations were highly ritualized, and certainly more ritualized than the nomadic tribes that surrounded them. Ancient Chinese state practiced extensive sacrifices, as did ancient Hindus,[vi] as did ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean, including Egypt, Israel, Rome, or Greece. The barbarian tribes surrounding Greece and Rome also practiced sacrifice, but their sacrifices were less elaborate, while their propensity for tribal warfare, as among North American Indians, was highly pronounced. Again, we have large cycles of violence of large civilizations juxtaposed with smaller cycles of violence of non-urbanized barbarians.
Historically, as Girard discusses in his works, the appearance of legal code played a big role in extending the cycle of violence.[vii] An absolute ruler was placed above all others and given a monopoly on violence. That way, reciprocal violence among citizens that would otherwise escalate into endless blood feuds could be terminated at the first iteration by a sovereign acting through the legal code. Yet, even in such a setup, to legitimize the royal authority, to render its violence pure in the sacrificial sense, sacrificial rituals were still performed. They propitiate the gods and obtain their blessings for the king’s, which is the say the society’s, way of doing things. Still, in their power to unify and to terminate reciprocal violence kings play the role analogous to that of the sacrificial victim, the original bringer of peace and harmony.
The progress of civilization coincides with the progress towards making the cycle of violence as large as possible. The ultimate hope is that the cycle would finally become a straight line; that the line would shoot away from us and never bend back to wreak havoc. At some point there appeared, in various forms, the hope that cycles of history that take men from enlightenment to dark ages will vanish. A whole new crop of religions expressed this hope. In Buddhism, the cycles of desire are to flatten into Nirvana. Judaism and Christianity and Islam, and in my view even the ancient Greek philosophy, are united in their implicit rejection of the sacrificial mechanism as the way to bring lasting peace. We here get into theological waters that are too deep for this essay, but perhaps a unifying positive idea of these systems is that they replace the collective and indiscriminate nature of the scapegoat mechanism with emphasis on individual moral agency and a God who is rational and moral in the modern sense.
As civilizations developed through to our modern times, the peace-bringing rituals evolved in the direction of becoming ever less violent. The foundational lynching became ever more dissimulated. Girard argues that this direction of history is not arbitrary: the foundational murder itself was essentially a dissimulation; it was a cover-up of the arbitrariness of the chosen victim and a double mythological lie of the culpability of the victim and the sanctity of the execution. From the beginning, there was a murder and a lie. This, to Girard, is the profound meaning of these words of Jesus:
“You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. (John 8:45, NIV)
The lies cultures tell themselves are meant to hide their foundational violence. But sometimes, at least, this dissimulation leads to progress because it results in less violent rituals. We went from sacrificing humans to sacrificing animals. In Ancient Greece, the sacrificial ritual seems to have been replaced by its victimless re-enactment in the theatre. As we saw above, the role of the sacrificial victim evolved into monarchy. Rituals that emphasized the strife of mimetic crisis evolved into sport. Rituals that emphasized the identification of the collective victim evolved into games of chance. Initiation rituals evolved into education. Rituals of gift exchange evolved into trade…[viii]
Already in the classical times, rituals of all kinds evolved into what we today recognize as institutions. Like rituals, institutions necessitate collective participation and collective differentiation between good and evil. The difference, if I could put it in one sentence, is that institutions are rational rather than sacred – rather than enforcing behaviour through fear of an invisible, mysterious, and capricious deity, they enforce it through the social contract – a cost-and-benefit calculation involving only knowable human forces.
If institutions are derivatives of ritual, then the argument that ritual violence extends the cycle of chaotic violence holds in our modern times, too. Cultures have never been larger and more complex than in our age of globalization. The rituals keeping them together are the institutions listed above.
Today we still see different sizes in cycles of violence among nations. Wherever there exists a chronic problem of tribalism, factionalism, or petty nationalism we see small cycles of violence, we see the straight trajectory towards progress repeatedly brought down by outbreaks of conflict (whether that conflict is triggered or enabled by foreign powers or not). Human energy and initiative in these regions are taken away from the development of culture and brought to bear upon hatred of neighbour. Today we see this happening in Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans, among other places.
The Balkans of the twentieth century have been an instructive example of this dynamic, and one with which I happen to be familiar. Throughout the modern era, the Balkans have been known for two things: intermittent ethnic conflict and a relatively low level of economic development. Located on the boundaries of great and conflicting cultures, the nations of the Balkans struggle to find their identity – in other words, they struggle to establish an effective, unifying set of rituals. This has been a theme in the Balkans for at least a millennium; even at the time of the arrival of Christianity, and later Islam, the local populations were reluctant converts, something that shows to this day through a high degree of pagan syncretism in the local practice of these religions.[ix] Later, arriving into a constantly ravaged and atavistic ecosystem, ravenous invasive species of modern ideologies such as nationalism, communism, liberalism, etc., came to wreak their own destruction.
Left without strong rituals and institutions, the people of the Balkans go for the ritual of the last resort: war, ethnic hatred. Everywhere in the world and not just the Balkans, when the established rituals are suddenly swept away by an aggressive new cultural force, the result is civil war. America trying to bring democracy to the Middle East in the early twenty-first century was a great and tragic example. The divide-and-conquer strategy of imperialism, whether practiced by Julius Caesar or by neoliberal imperialists, works only in places with a pre-existing propensity for petty warfare as a cathartic ritual, whether because of the failure of better rituals or because better rituals never existed there in the first place. This famed strategy is unlikely to work on relatively advanced cultures. It is hard to imagine, for the time being at least, China or America getting the Austrians and the Swiss to go at it, or the Belgians and the Dutch.
The Balkan civilization is advanced enough to diffuse violence on the small scale of tribes and villages. Mostly, that is; there are exceptions in Albanian and Montenegrin tribes engaging in intermittent blood feuds to this day.[x] Not civilized enough for the relatively bloodless institutions of the developed modern world, but too civilized for tribal warfare, the cultures of the Balkans find themselves in the middle position where national-level warfare becomes the point of least resistance for channelling pent-up mimetic violence. There is a dedicated word to describe this middle ground: “balkanization.”[xi]
We see in the Balkans a region whose smaller cycles of violence result in a lower level of development relative to Western Europe, a region that has been through several completed crucibles of ritualistic civilizations (Ancient Rome, political Christianity, secular institutions). That is not to say that Western Europe is not prone to violence, but only that those outbursts of violence come less frequently. When they do, they are more catastrophic. All that organizational and cultural capital translates into efficiency of killing when the war finally arrives. Consider only the two world wars. Even in peacetime, there is the endlessly discussed threat of technological advances becoming tools of oppression, with the dangers of AI being perhaps the most exemplary case study.
It can easily be argued that as history progresses, we see ever longer cycles of violence. But the longer the cycle of violence, the more destructive the violence is once it finally returns. Intermittent warfare with bows and arrows has been replaced by world wars and now by the threat of a single and final nuclear war. Or if the world does not end with a nuclear bang, there is the fear of it ending with the whimper in the form of a Matrix-like subjugation of humans to a computer network.
Indeed, how does it all end? One is tempted to imagine some sort of an asymptote. One embodiment of it seems to be the mutually assured destruction of a nuclear Armageddon. The most advanced civilizations ever have created the largest but also the most destructive cycles of violence. It is a question regarding a mathematical singularity yet to be revealed, a Riemann Hypothesis for the humanities of sorts, to ask whether the present circle, arching into infinity, will indeed bring eternal peace, or bend back upon us to unleash a nuclear holocaust.
René Girard has pondered over the singularity in his final book, Achever Clausewitz.[xii] He pointed to the Book of Revelations as a fascinating authority precisely on this question. His interpretation was that the apocalypse will not bring the violence of God upon men, but rather the violence of men upon their fellow men. Satan, who was a liar and a murderer from the beginning, also expulses Satan: primitive lies are expelled and replaced by more sophisticated modern lies.[xiii] At the same time, the lie has been revealed to us, and when the final moment of truth comes, it will be up to each one of us to choose between that lie and the truth.
Read more in the book Catharses.
[i] René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, Chapter 11 – The Unity of All Rites
[ii] Violence and the Sacred, Chapter 2 – The Sacrificial Crisis. Girard relies on the description of the Kaingang given in the book Jungle People by the American anthropologist Jules Henry, who lived among the Kaingang shortly after they were transferred to a reservation.
[iii] War as a sacrificial ritual can be polluted too. Consider the accusations aimed at modern political leaders for dragging their nations into wars they claimed to be righteous, but that are suspected of being wages for the benefit of an elite minority.
[iv] Von Clausewitz, Carl. On War. Tr. Graham, J.J. (1874). See Book I, Ch. I: “What is War” S. 3: “Utmost Use of Force”. Available on Gutenberg.org
[v] See Wikipedia article on “Human sacrifice in pre-Columbian cultures”.
For a more scholarly source see The Cambridge World History of Violence. “Part IV - Religious, Sacred and Ritualised Violence: 19 - Human Sacrifice and Ritualised Violence in the Americas before the European Conquest.” Cambridge University Press: 13 March 2020. By Ute Schüren and Wolfgang Gabbert. Edited by Matthew S. Gordon, Richard W. Kaeuper and Harriet Zurndorfer.
[vi] Late in his career René Girard discovered the supreme importance of sacrifice in Hindu Vedas. He gave several extensive lectures on the topic; recordings are available online.
[vii] Violence and the Sacred, Chapter 1, where Girard does a thorough comparison of the justice systems of societies with and without a “judicial system.” His point of reference is work by Robert Lowie, Primitive Society (New York, 1970), p. 400.
[viii] All the transitions from ritual to modern games or institutions have been covered by René Girard somewhere in his books. For a general discussion on the topic, see the penultimate chapter (“Unity of All Rites”) of Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. For the origin of games of chance in the rites of selecting a victim, for example, see his discussion in the last chapter (“Conclusion”) of the same book.
[ix] All European nations contain remnants of their pre-Christian culture, but the Balkans have a strong case for having most of them. Consider the living pagan customs in Bulgaria such as the kukeri; Serbian slava, the celebrations of family’s patron saint said to originate from pagan celebrations of patron gods or spirits; the syncretic celebration of St. George as a Christian derivative of Yarilo, the pagan god of spring; the syncretic mixture of St. Elijah and the chief Slavic god Perun; the early-modern era popular hysteria surrounding vampires after popular reports of these supernatural creatures roaming in the Balkans, etc.
[x] There has been a trend of YouTube documentaries on contemporary blood feuds among Albanians and Montenegrins. The most viewed documentary has been Blood Debt: Feudal Familial Law in the Balkans by Vice, uploaded April 3, 2015.
[xi] In Russia they have a similar word for it: “raskol”.
[xii] Translated into English as Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre. Michigan State University Press: 2009.
[xiii] The famous words of Jesus: “How can Satan cast out Satan?” (Mark 3:23) are taken by Girard to refer to the expulsion of one sacrificial culture by another. See Chapter XIV of The Scapegoat.