Rene Girard’s victim complex

The topics covered in the interviews include the literary texts that first inspired Girard’s ideas on mimesis, the anthropological and religious interests of his later career, and his thoughts on the contemporary world, which he addressed relatively little in his published writings. He discusses William Shakespeare and Marcel Proust, St. Paul and Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Darwin and Emile Durkheim. Interviewers solicit his views on topics ranging from U.S. partisan politics to jihadist terrorism to anorexia. The result is a portrait of an intellectual with a supple mind in dialogue with an eclectic array of influences.

A key instance of Girard’s intellectual nonconformism, on view here, is that he took both evolutionary biology and religion seriously. His goal, which he saw as an extension of Darwin’s, was to explain how humans evolved into creatures of culture as well as nature. His speculative answer was that our heightened imitative capacity was an adaptive advantage, enabling in-group coordination and the acquisition and sharing of knowledge. But imitation also predisposed early humans toward rivalries that escalated into vendettas and blood feuds, so we developed rituals that allowed us to purge conflict from the group.

As Girard sums up his view: “Mankind is a species that can always destroy itself. For this reason, it created religion.” All religions, in his account, are originally sacrificial because they derive from the ritualized reenactment of what he terms “the scapegoat mechanism.” The scapegoat mechanism, he argues, is a spontaneous means for human groups to resolve mimetic conflicts by channeling intergroup aggression toward a “surrogate victim”: All conflict is attributed to the presence of the victim, who is cast as an evil aggressor and purged from the community (think of the dynamics of a witch trial). His main evidence for the ubiquity of this phenomenon is its representation in myths, which he read as distorted records of real events.

In one interview, Girard clarifies that treating myths as records of real persecutions is not his own methodological innovation but an extension of an “amazing feat of modern interpretation” that predated him. To make this point, he turns to the records of persecution of witches and Jews in the late Middle Ages. When these records were composed, people believed that the accused had violated taboos, consorted with the devil, and caused plague and famine. But with a few centuries’ hindsight, historians came to understand these accusations as fictions that provided a pretext for persecution. Girard applies the same demystifying strategy to ancient mythical figures such as Oedipus, also portrayed as a taboo violator who brought misfortune.

Today, we still engage in scapegoating, but we are also quicker to perceive the victims’ innocence than our ancestors were. The 1980s “Satanic panic,” in which ordinary people were accused of committing lurid offenses during occult rituals, offers an illustration. We now understand that the accused were usually blameless casualties of a moral panic. The deep source of our ability to see through the fabulations of persecutors, for Girard, is the deconstruction of myth found in the Jewish and Christian scriptures. He reads the Hebrew Bible as a collection of countermyths that take the side of the victims and show that the accusations against them are false. Its heroes are figures such as Joseph, who is shown to be an innocent victim of collective persecution. The innocence of Jesus in the Gospels is an extension of this sensibility. Christians have repeatedly reverted to scapegoating patterns, as the aforementioned anti-Semitic persecutions and witch hunts remind us. Girard asserts, however, that the biblical advocacy of victims has also furnished the intellectual tools for counteracting such tendencies.

Surprisingly, Girard claims to derive this insight about Christianity from the writings of Nietzsche. One takeaway from the new collection is the depth of his relation to Nietzsche, discussed at length in several interviews. Unlike contemporaries such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who saw Nietzsche as a philosopher of perspectivism and the infinite play of meaning, Girard emphasizes Nietzsche’s idea that Christianity overturned myth by taking the side of victims.

Girard states that his own “views could be defined as … Nietzscheism in reverse.” Unlike Nietzsche, who repudiated Christianity for siding with victims, Girard was a Christian and viewed the discrediting of scapegoating as a landmark of moral progress. Especially in his later years, however, he also saw the implications of this development as apocalyptic. As he states in one interview: “From the point of view of the state, Christianity is a force of anarchy.” Because sacrificial violence was the primary means by which societies kept mimetic conflict under control, its decline has deprived modern society of a means of self-preservation.

Girard frequently quoted G.K. Chesterton’s statement that “the modern world is full of Christian ideas gone berserk.” In modern times, he argues, the Jewish and Christian advocacy of victims has devolved into a mimetic contest in which groups seek power by claiming victim status. Paradoxically, today, victimization is often carried out on behalf of victims. In a particularly somber interview, Girard associates this perversion of Christianity with the Antichrist invoked in the Book of Revelation: “You can foresee the shape of what the Anti-Christ is going to be: a super-victimary machine that will keep on sacrificing in the name of the victim.” It’s not a hopeful view of the future, but it’s a frighteningly plausible one.

Geoff Shullenberger is a writer and academic. He blogs at outsidertheory.com. Follow him on Twitter: @daily_barbarian.