René Girard on the appeal of the mob and the false promise of equality

I hear many people talking about René Girard these days - Roman Catholic, French philosopher and sort of anthropologist, died just a few years ago in 2015. And his personal story might be encouraging to young people actually - failed a major exam in high school and was expelled, fired from his first college teaching job for not publishing enough, might’ve looked like quite inauspicious beginnings but he ended life an influential philosopher.

So I’ve been wanting to read some Girard (I read just a little before), and someone here recommended me Reading the Bible with René Girard. Although I quite enjoyed the book I should say up front that I am not sure I would actually recommend reading the Bible with René Girard, at least not with him as your primary guide. He takes a very anthropological reading of the Bible and essentially sees it as an historical and theological narrative about the transition from sacrifice-oriented archaic religion and into modern Christianity… but Protestants who care about stuff like inerrancy would find plenty to make them uncomfortable in his reading. Actually he seems to have a sort of Roman Catholic idea that the creeds of the Church are actually higher than the Bible - for example, he mentions that he probably doesn’t believe in Satan as any sort of personal being, and anyway, none of the creeds of the Church require him to, right?

But what I wanted to mention here were some of his thoughts about the appeal of the mob and the false promise of equality. Near as I can tell (and you Girard scholars feel free to improve my understanding), two of his core ideas are mimetic theory and the scapegoat phenomenon.

Mimetic theory: Our desires are not naked, personal things, but are formed by imitating others (and those others can be fictional or real). Humans are imitators. Teaching Don Quixote seems to have been the initial inspiration of his thinking.

So what Cervantes wanted to show us is a character who is carried away by his dream, but his dream is not really his own: his dream is about all the books he’s read.

And great literature is often about this aspect of human life (Girard might even say it is always about this aspect of human life, but I wouldn’t follow him that far if he does).

There is not a straight line between the desiring subject and the desired object; rather, there is a triangle with a model directing the desire of the hero towards an object which, if he had been all by himself, he would not have desired.

At a minimum we would all recognize that this is sometimes true, much of the modern advertising industry intentionally exploits it. And surely every teacher and parent is aware that he is often imitated.

But there is a problem now, because when two people desire the same object, they become rivals. Envy and jealousy are the vices that go with mimetic desire.

When he is imitated, he will turn into a rival, because the two characters will be in love with the same object, and therefore will become rivals for that object.

And this can eventually lead to violence. Girard sees humans as a particularly violent animal. Others animals have instincts that can lead to violence, but they don’t have things like the human desire for vengeance.

This is probably, in my view, decisive in the definition of humanity, because this greater power of imitation is both the driver of our intelligence, our ability to learn from others, and also accounts for our violence, our rivalries, and the fact that we kill one another.

Uncontrolled, this violence could cripple human civilization, so societies have dealt with it via the…

Scapegoat phenomenon: Mimetic fighting tends to naturally increase over time. If one person desires an object, that might make a second person desire it. But now two people desire it, which makes it look even more appealing, so this attracts even more people, and so on, until eventually the whole community is fighting for the same object. This violence eventually becomes arrested when focus shifts from the object to some common enemy (probably one of the rivals for the object who is somehow selected by the community as being especially bad).

If you’re fighting for the same object you can never be reconciled with your opponent. But if you’re fighting the same enemies, if many people are fighting each other, it’s very easy to share the same enemy with someone else, so the mimetic influx tends to shift from objects to the antagonists themselves.

As the whole community turns against a single antagonist, this antagonist is then killed which, at least for a while, will bring peace to the community. This victim, people had become convinced, was actually responsible for the whole trouble, so his death brings reconciliation. But of course it can’t last. Over time, mimetic rivalry comes back, but the community remembers that, we might say, sacrificing a victim saved them last time, so they’ll do it all over again. Girard basically sees this as the birth of archaic religion, which was sacrifice-oriented.

They will deliberately choose other victims and kill them collectively in the hope that this will reconcile them again. It does, mimetically; this is the invention of ritual sacrifice.

Maybe you’d care to apply that to the behavior of some of the humans around you in 2023. I’m not going to keep elaborating but basically, Girard would say, eventually Christianity comes along and turns this whole thing on its head by revealing to the community what is really going on, revealing that the victim (with Jesus now the archetypal victim) is actually innocent. And so everywhere Christianity spread, the actual sacrificing of humans or animals was ended.

OK. If you’re like me, you probably believed all that in part, but would not try to explain nigh all of human relations in terms of mimetic theory, which seems to be the way Girard leans. But, as I said, I appreciated Girard applying this thinking to the appeal of the mob, and the false promise of equality.

The appeal of the mob

That was a long introduction for a couple of short points now (this could be a sermon!). Girard was mostly writing before the internet… which is somewhat noteworthy, because mobs and mob behavior is everywhere now. There’s probably a new social media outrage mob somewhere everyday. And mobs are a mimetic phenomenon - everybody imitating everybody else is almost the definition of a mob.

And so for example, referencing a probably-not-part-of-original-text story about the woman caught in adultery, in the book of John (but little details like that don’t seem to bother Girard¹)… it’s hard to be the first person to cast a stone, but it’s relatively easy to be the 10th. If we get to the 100th you might feel more exposed if you aren’t joining in with the mob.

Why is the first stone the hardest to cast? Because no stone before has been cast and you have no one to imitate. Jesus tries to prevent the first stone from being cast.

I would say the point about human behavior is true even if the story was added later.

The other big example he offers is Peter’s denial of Christ. And I appreciate analyses like this because, while the Bible isn’t merely an anthropological text, it does also show and describe true anthropology. So, Girard says, when Jesus is arrested, Peter doesn’t flee, he follows. So his heart is in the right place. But then he finds himself with a crowd, and it makes him weak.

He enters the courtyard with everybody else, but when he finds himself in the crowd, he proves his own weakness. The fact is that a man alone among other men will just join the crowd; we all join the crowd.

I quite appreciated that final sentence. This is why truth needs a community, very few of us can truly stand alone. So, in a negative way here, Peter cannot resist the pull of the crowd.

We cannot resist the mimetic contagion. When you’re in a crowd, you literally become possessed by the crowd. The Gospels, from an anthropological viewpoint, show you that the crowd spirit is all-powerful, that only Jesus can conquer it. They show that the crowd or the mob is a real power on earth, since it can conquer even Peter, which is pretty disturbing if you regard this also as a prophecy of what will happen at the last day, which it may well be, because right now that’s what we’re seeing.

Just going to say again that Girard said this before social media was really a thing. He suggests later that Peter also doesn’t really know what he’s doing.

Not so many centuries ago, everybody automatically believed in God. That didn’t mean much. Today, when no one automatically believes in God, it’s purely a mob phenomenon. It’s not because there are powerful scientific arguments. It’s Peter’s denial, that’s all it is. That Peter’s denial is infinitely more powerful tells you, more than any other text, what society is about. Then at the same time, the idea that Peter doesn’t know what he’s doing is extremely important. In other words, he’s denying Jesus for sure, but he’s not conscious of what he’s really doing.

And then, and I’ll end here, he also explains Peter’s joining the crowd as a sort of common-enemy phenomenon.

She says, “Anyway, I recognize you because you have that Galilean accent,” which is unpopular in Jerusalem. In other words, you’re a kind of foreigner: you’re not even one of us, you’re a stranger. So what does Peter do? He wants to show he’s one of them, so the only way to show you’re part of a crowd is to join in the scapegoating. If I have the same enemy you have, then I’m one of you.

Applications to the modern world are obvious.

The false promise of equality

And then, more briefly… it is interesting to me that the worlds we create in Hollywood are often so different from the real world. Fictional cities on the screen are often beautifully walkable, for example, and then we pave the real world with asphalt! But we also seem to love hierarchies, in fiction, even as we demand equality here. But equality won’t give you what you think, Girard says, because when you and the person you are imitating are more like each other, the mimetic rivalry and all the negative consequences that follow are also worse.

We see less and less distance between models and their imitators, and this is the fundamental fact of our civilization. We feel we’re constantly moving toward more happiness as we become more equal, but in fact we’re always moving toward more rivalry.

And then a little bit later… and I’ll end here. Helpful to know the interviews for the book were seemingly shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, you can perhaps hear concerns about terrorism here.

This is the illusion of modernist circles: that if you do away with differences, you create peace. In reality, however, the lack of differentiation is the fighting twins: the less difference there is in the world, the more violence increases. So this is why you can’t believe modernism, with its empty promises of peace if we do with less differentiation all around…

…one or two centuries ago, people could see the approaching unity of the world and really be one in the sense that the same values would prevail all over the world. They saw that, in a way, as the realization of utopia. Now that it’s upon us, we’re becoming more and more aware that it’s not peace at all that is our inheritance, but more war, more undifferentiated war, more undeclared war, more undifferentiation between the victims and the persecutors, the young and the old, the soldiers, the civilians and terrorists.

There you go.

---

1. I would say he has the attitude that early Christians, the early Church, valued this story, and so it tells us something important about Christianity, even if it never happened. (And he probably has the same attitude toward some stories that actually are in the original text of the Bible.)