05/07/2020
Robert Harrison on mimetic desire, social media, and biotechnology
This episode is a pre-recorded show that originally aired on March 4th, 2019 on Christopher Lydon’s “Open Source” podcast.In this conversation, Christopher Lydon and professor Robert Harrison discuss René Girard and his theory of mimetic desire. Additionally, professor Harrison also comments on social media, and recent advancements in biotechnology.
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This is your host Robert Harrison,
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as entitled opinions idols away during the Corona virus lockdown this spring season.
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We thought to offer you up the following conversation I had with Christopher Leiden last March 2019.
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It originally aired on his open source, a remarkable show coming out of Boston
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and anchored by Chris Leiden, who is a journalist and thinker, who a mutual friend of ours,
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Kelly Z and Rome aptly calls an intellectual ecstatic.
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We hope you enjoy this broad-ranging conversation about mimetic desire, social media, biotechnology, and other related topics.
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I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions.
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I'm Christopher Leiden, and this is an open source extra, playing catch, so to speak,
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coast to coast with Robert Poe Harrison.
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He's a teaching legend at Stanford in the humanities.
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He's a Dante scholar, but he's a contemporary, and a podcaster,
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of ideas, of all things.
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Poe Harrison, you keep opening doors for me into the weeds of social media, for example,
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into the source power, and now maybe the shipwreck of things like Facebook.
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You got it because your colleague and friend Renee Girard understood it as an almost philosophical proposition.
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Twenty years ago, I see a story of ideas here, Poe Harrison, and in opening for you and me to have a conversation.
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Okay, well Chris, thanks for having me on.
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I'm delighted to engage in this conversation, coast to coast.
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I feel a little bit like Ken Keezy to your Timothy Leary, speaking to you from Stanford, and you being there in Boston.
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On that question of social media, the funny thing is that just before coming into the studio,
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a friend of mine called me who said that she had been reading a very interesting article by Greg Jackson in the hedgehog review called "The Inner Life of a Sinking Ship",
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which is about social media.
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I didn't know that people now on the average check their phones about 150 times a day,
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and most of that is in order to check their Instagram or Facebook.
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And the point that Greg Jackson is making from what I learned from this friend of mine is that most people do that in order to sue anxiety,
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in order to feel less lonely, but it actually creates this addiction as you call it.
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And that addiction is couched in the idea that we do the addicting behavior to sue the anxiety.
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But Jackson's point is that social media and other forms of media actually shift what we think of as our choices and agency.
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And this is something interesting to think about. I'm an addictive personality, but I do not understand the addiction to social media.
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It's something like Facebook to me.
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What the appeal is to have a prosthetic self or a prosthetic social life or a prosthetic friends, I say prosthetic because as a student of mine,
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who my query to freshman, when I asked of what would happen if they took your Facebook page away and he said to me very seriously,
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if my Facebook page didn't exist, I think that I would no longer exist.
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Wow.
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For me, I've been in the Facebook world sort of cured myself, former addict, gone called Turkey, maybe.
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But your man, Renee Girard, the French intellectual, died about three years ago.
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He saw something here and he told his student Peter Thiel about it enough so that Peter Thiel became the first huge outside investor in Facebook.
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I have a feeling your man Girard saw the power, but also the crash that we may be witnessing certainly in Europe already.
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What crash now are you referring to, Chris, because from what I'm reading, Facebook is bigger than ever, it has more millions of viewers.
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It doesn't seem to be crashing in any quantitative sense of the word.
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What is some level that's been revealed as exploitative?
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England, especially the parliament, is hounding Mark Zuckerberg until they get him in front of them and they're going to rake him for all kinds of business practices,
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but the fundamental idea is being attacked too, that these are not real connections, they're not real friends, it's playing with language for the crassest commercial use.
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But anyway, quite apart from that, it's the idea of in Girard's work, this word mimises from the Greek imitation that we are in imitated species,
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something with a terrible envy built into it, a competitive desire to be like some ideal of the other person, and that Facebook was the perfect mechanical vehicle of it.
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Well, for the sake of our listeners, let me just take a step back and say who Renee Girard was.
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He was a colleague of mine, a good friend of mine here at Stanford.
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He came to the United States in 1947 from France and taught as at a number of American universities, always in departments of literature, although he had his PhD in history.
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He published this foundational book in the 1960s called "Deseet Desire and the Novel" in English as a different title in French.
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In that book, he put forward this theory for which he's rightly kind of famous today, which is called the "Mimetic Theory".
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He said that word "Mimises" comes from the Greek word for imitation, and Girard claims that our desires are actually not our own.
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We have this illusion that there's nothing more proper to myself than my own desires, but the argues in that first book of his that it's actually other people's desire that we imitate.
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That "Mimetic Desire" becomes a syndrome that he uncovers in a number of the great novels of the 19th early 20th century.
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We're talking about Stondale and Dussewiefsky, Flobaire, Pruste, Cervantes, even.
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This theory of "Mimetic Desire" leads him to all sorts of insights into human psychology that I think are directly relevant to the social media phenomenon.
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He didn't have a lot to say himself about social media because he was not a practitioner of it.
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But as you mentioned, he had a student in the late 80s, early 90s, Peter Thiel, who, by the way, as we speak teaching a course, co-teaching a course here at Stanford in my department.
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Wow, in what?
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Well, it's about ideas of sovereignty and globalization, and of course, Renee Girard is one of the thinkers that he is dealing with.
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Peter Thiel, yeah, he took these courses with Renee Girard. He understood the "Mimetic Theory" and thought that it really was a key to human behavior and psychology, and also to the geopolitics of our world.
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I don't think it's by chance that he was the first investor in Facebook.
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I think he understood that Facebook was going to become this vast theater of "Mimetic Desire" and "Mimetic Envy."
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You write in that article that hooked me, you said it took a highly intelligent Girardian that is Peter Thiel.
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Well-schooled in "Mimetic Theory" to it early on, that Facebook was about to open a worldwide theater of "Mimetic Desire" on people's personal computers.
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Peter Thiel himself, in interviews, has confirmed Girard's influence on him.
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You'd have a lunch discussion or a discussion with him at some of the colloquium seminars that we did at Stanford, where one would really be struck just by his incredible perceptiveness into the human nature.
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I suspect that when the history of the 20th century is written circa 2100, he will be seen as truly one of the great intellectuals, but it may still be a long time until it's fully
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fully understood.
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And in fact, this article that I was referencing earlier raises a question of what is social media doing to human agency and what is doing to our sense of who is actually making our choices for us?
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Are we making choices for ourselves?
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Or are our choices mediated hopelessly by this vast network of social media that most people are connected to these days?
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Explain how social media and friending and showing your vacation pictures or your cats or your grandmother's death or whatever serves this idea of imitation.
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Well, look, if I go to Greece for the summer and I post pictures of my wonderful vacation in the beaches of Greece and so forth, well, if you're one of my online friends, the chances are that you're eventually going to post pictures of an equally desirable destination.
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Or if I start posting comments and photos of a dinner party that I gave, chances are you're going to do the same because, as Renat
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beings are profoundly memetic, we imitate each other in our behavior but what his original insight was that we don't only imitate behavior, we imitate each other's desires and therefore if you want to be, I want to be, Jean-Grees.
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And yet so much of social media is about the envy of what we perceive to be a fullness of being in those people whom we are rivalrous with or who serve as our models of emulation and who we think are somehow playing the game better than we are.
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If you say Renat's rod among the human scientists, the great ones of the last century and more, you know, is all inclusive as deep in certain ways as Freud or Marx in what motivates them, in what motivates us, explain that in terms of desire.
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How is Nimesis different from Freudian desire?
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To begin with, it doesn't apostulate an unconscious, which is one of the theoretical problems with Freudian desire.
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It looks at human behavior and can actually, empirically show, originally, Gerard looked at literature for his forensic evidence.
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But the reason that book made such an impression on people is because they recognize themselves in the memetic desire that they saw in the characters after Gerard had pointed out how it works.
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So I don't think it's, I think that the theory of desire is much more intuitive and something that is almost unproblematic in nature, whereas the Freudian theory of deeply buried, edible complexes and so forth,
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is a harder cell from the scientific point of view.
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What you see, Mimesis and Imitation, in your case, I mean, you see it everywhere.
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You quote a VS Night Paul character, but there was a writer who went deep.
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One of his characters says, "We become what we see of ourselves in the eyes of others."
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Correct. And that is in a book that Niphal published called "The Mimic Men," which is the way in which the ex-colonial ruling class people have taken the British colonizers as their models of imitation.
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Yet they know the narrator in his book "The Mimic Men" knows that he will never be accepted within that society of the British ruling class.
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Yet it serves as, you know, that's the model, it's the ideal, the ego ideal.
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And we become what we see in the eyes of others is something that that narrator realizes is the source of his...
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Well, the secondary nature of himself and also a source of constant frustration.
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I was struck, Paul also, our man, William James, who knew Freud very slightly, but he plumbed consciousness as Freud did the unconscious.
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He wrote about imitation. He said in his principles of psychology, 1890, he wrote, "We start with instinct to suckle and cry out, and from then on man is essentially the imitative animal. His whole edge of ability."
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And in fact, the whole history of civilization depended on this trait, which his strong tendencies to rivalry, jealousy, and equisitiveness reinforce.
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And, says, "William James, there is the imitative tendency in masses of man and produces panics and orgies and frenzies of violence in which only the rarest individuals can actively withstand."
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Yeah, that's beautiful. That's so convergent with Scharard's theory of mimetic desire.
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And there you go, you see, William James and Scharard are looking at desire in the social world, in the world of human relations. Freud's theories of desire are rather enclosed within the psyche of the individual self, and the individual self's family history.
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James and Scharard locate desire in our relations with others, and therefore it becomes a hugely important social, and as well as political force in history.
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You persuaded me in what I've read so far, Paul, that, "Renegereard, there's nobody so obscure out there in the world of big ideas who is so relevant, who's had more to say about the metal distress that we are all living through in the 21st century. I want to know more."
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True that Scharard is not nearly as acknowledged as he deserves to be yet, and yet more and more it's becoming clear that his insights into the mimetic mechanism, as well as what he later developed as the scapegoat mechanism, that these two fundamental ideas of his entire corpus get more and more confirmation through our social, as well as our historical geopolitical history.
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And it seems to me to be inevitable that this relatively obscure French intellectual, pretty well known within the walls of academia, is going to become much more of a major figure in the world at large.
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Yeah, can I quote you on the world of 2019, you say the explosion of social media, the resurgence of populism and the increasing virulence of reciprocal violence, all suggests that the contemporary world is becoming more and more recognizably Girardian in its behavior.
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Where else can you see?
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Yeah, I can add there that this relationship between desire and violence is fundamental because while desire is mimetic, violence is maybe the one thing that is even more mimetic than human desire.
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If you hit me, I'm likely to hit you back, or if you start as a nation arming yourself, that means your neighbor nation is going to start arming itself.
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The mimetic contagion of violence is something that Girard spent the second half of his intellectual career thinking a lot about.
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And there's no doubt that the psychology of reciprocal violence is at work in many places in the world as we speak.
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To jump ahead toward the end of his life, he sounds obsessed with the danger of modern military violence as was William James, too, a hundred years earlier.
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The birth of the American Empire scared him to death. But here's Girard at the end of his life, toward the end of his life. History, you might say, is a test for mankind, but we know very well that mankind is failing that test. He wrote that in the 21st century.
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He said, in some ways, the gospels and scriptures are predicting that failure since it ends with eschatological themes, which are literally the end of the world.
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And when Majora's conclusion was, we must face our neighbors and declare unconditional peace. Even if we are provoked, challenge, we must give up violence once and for all.
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That's easier said than done, Chris, as you know. And I think Girard is far more compelling in his diagnosis of the problem of violence rather than what he offers as a kind of alternative, which is a kind of pacifism that one shouldn't actually discount it.
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The idea that this refusal to retaliate, he believed, was really the only recommendation, the only sane recommendation in the face of this vortex that international violence could create.
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If I can quote from the last book that he published called "Baddling to the End" where he's analyzing war, and it's actually a book where he goes back to visit the thought of "Cloudsovich, the great theorist of modern warfare, Carl von, the class of its 1780 to 1831, Girard writes, "Cloudsovich sees very clearly that modern wars, or as violent as they are,
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only because they are reciprocal." Now, when we hear the word "reciprocal" here in the Girardian context, that means also "mimetic." I continue.
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"Mobilization involves more and more people until it is total," as Ernst Euler wrote of the 1914 war, that famous concept of the total war.
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It was because he was responding to the humiliations inflicted by the Treaty of Versailles and the occupation of the Rhineland that Hitler was able to mobilize a whole people.
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Likewise, it was because he was responding to the German invasion that Stalin achieved a decisive victory over Hitler.
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It was because he was responding to the United States that had been Latin, Plan 9/11.
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The one who believes he can control violence by setting up defenses is in fact controlled by violence.
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And that seems to be a syndrome without a way out, and that's why this recommendation of non-retaliation, of not striking back, it was why Girard thought that that was the only kind of sane ethic that he could propose.
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For us all.
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There's more of Girard I want to get into, Paul, but I also want to introduce you, and specifically your own podcast.
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You call yours entitled "Pinions."
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We call ours American Conversations with Global Attitude.
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People keep telling me there's a meeting of minds to be made here between us, but specifically, I love it that in the opening to entitled opinions,
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you tease your audience about setting the bar pretty high, maybe too high for some listeners.
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Warning.
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The following is an unadulterated unusually concentrated intellectual discussion.
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It should be avoided by anyone who does not have a very high tolerance for thinking.
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If you have an aversion to the exchange of ideas, if you're deficient in curiosity,
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if you suffer from common American anti-intellectualism, then please tune out now.
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This show promotes the narcotic of intelligent conversation.
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It takes us into the garden and seats us at the banquet table of ideas, where we feast on the bread of angels.
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Clear and distinct thinking, intuitive analysis, and an enriched use of English.
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We bring them all to bear on the pursuit of self-knowledge, so be warned.
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We don't dumb things down around here.
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We ratchet up and let it rip.
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I hear spoken in podcast, who listens, who gets it, who doesn't,
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what students think of it, how different it is from teaching, how do you avoid it becoming pedagogical or pedantic?
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How does it go?
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Well, the way it works with me, Chris, might be different than what you have going on over there in Boston.
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I share my radio.
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It's primarily a radio show.
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I insist it remaining a radio show, even though it airs on Stanford College radio,
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and it only reaches a Bay Area audience live, but nevertheless, even though 99.9% of my audience is in the podcast medium,
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I like the idea that it's still a radio show.
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And for me, I don't have any sponsors.
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I don't need to worry about ratings or clicks or we don't have social media.
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I'm very happy, and in fact, eager for entitled opinions to be a cult show that operates really under the radar, underground, as it were.
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It has developed a wide following around the world precisely because it is unabashedly about ideas.
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It doesn't worry about the general anti-intellectualism of American society.
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I hate to say it, but we are to a great extent, an anti-intellectual.
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We have an anti-intellectual strain in our society.
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As I say, often in my shows, we descend into the catacombs, and that's almost literally because KZSU, which is the radio station here at Stanford,
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you have to walk down about five or six steps, and it's entering into the underworld, and that we go down into the catacombs in order to practice this persecuted religion of thinking.
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And in those catacombs, that's where new religions are born.
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If I were a founder of a religion, I would hope it would be a religion of just thinking.
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Exchange of ideas, revisiting the great works of literature, philosophy, issues of science, of the cosmos.
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And I have the luxury of not having to worry about sponsorship or ratings and so forth.
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It's unabashedly intellectual in a high-octane mode.
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Dante spoke of the Bread of Angels as the kind of intellectual nourishment that comes from the study of science and cosmology and philosophy and so forth.
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This kind of Bread of Angels is actually available for free, and not a lot of people avail themselves of it, either because they don't know where to go to find it,
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or because we tend to, those of us in this business feel that we always have to dumb things down if we're going to maintain an audience.
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But I think you're absolutely right that the hunger for a serious exchange of ideas is out there, and it's up to those of us who are able to do so to provide that nourishment.
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What's your range, Pogue? One of the limits of what you like to cover in terms of science, philosophy, history, literature, as you say.
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It's a broad range, very wide range.
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The shows I do about topics that are not in my wheelhouse of, let's say, specialty, like science, cosmology, medicine.
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I have to do a lot more homework for those shows, and yet I feel that there's always some reward in doing that homework because I want to be an intelligent interlocutor with my guest, whoever he or she is.
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And therefore, I do cover mostly the wheelhouse's philosophy and literature.
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The history of, and we're going back from the Greeks to the present day.
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But since I am at Stanford, and I have this wide array of faculty members here at my disposal to engage in conversations with,
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it's more and more going into realms of science, as well as political, political theory in the last few years.
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Maybe the election of Trump has something to do with this, but in the last couple of seasons of entitled opinions had a much stronger political slant than they did earlier.
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Pogue We Are Drawn as you are into sciences, but you're not most especially because the gene editing boom is, seems to be concentrated here in Boston, Cambridge, as well as in Berkeley.
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There's a great rivalry over who's going to own the CRISPR patents and make tons of money on them, but there are huge questions of understanding of humanistic tradition.
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And who are we? What can be? What cannot be amended? Where's the soul in all of those genes? And what part of intelligence, for example, can be tweaked?
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I know you have been to the mountaintop with those scientists and some of the conferences scientists here who remember you very vividly for speaking for connecting Dante and the trial of Ulysses going back to sea
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out of the Mediterranean to his death in the Atlantic Ocean as a kind of metaphor of where the gene scientists are heading. But how do you do it? How much science do you have to know? How ready do you find the scientists to talk in your humanistic tradition?
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Well, those scientists are not going to talk in the humanistic tradition, but for some reason I was invited, I know the reason is because I'm very skeptical about what's taking place in the gene editing CRISPR technology.
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It's true that Dante's Ulysses is almost like the archetype of scientific discovery. He is the one who wants to venture into the unpeapled world. He tells his crew at the Straits of Gibraltar, let us continue to pursue virtue and knowledge. That is what you are meant to be your humans.
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You are not brought us to virtue and knowledge. The scientific enterprise is following in this Ulyssian wake to explore newer and newer frontiers.
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I think that there is a line that is being crossed today, which is that of taking the role of creation into our own hands and presuming to know better than nature what it is that nature should be doing with itself.
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I think here is where one has to also question the motivations that are sponsoring a lot of biotechnology.
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These motivations are always couched in extremely benevolent terms that you are trying to eradicate diseases or you are trying to save a child's life. There is always the pathetic appeal, pathoslatin, not pathetic in the sense of pathetic, but pathoslatin appeal to making sure that people no longer die of malaria because we can now re-engineer mosquitoes so that we can wipe out the malaria mosquitoes.
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| 00:31:03.900 |
But what gets forgotten is the first principle of the Hippocratic Oath which is do no harm. There is a fundamental difference between presuming to do good and then to do no harm.
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| 00:31:20.900 |
Because in the name of doing good you can license a lot of harm. We know that even from our political history if you believe that the end justifies the means.
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| 00:31:34.900 |
So on the one hand there is this rhetoric of benevolence and that is why I bring in Dante also another figure from Dante's Divine Comedy which is the monster Jerry on.
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| 00:31:46.900 |
And he is a monster who stands for fraud in Dante's Inferno.
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| 00:31:54.900 |
And he has the face of a gentle and kind smiling man. He has a furry body and he has the tail of a scorpion.
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| 00:32:02.900 |
Now when it comes to CRISPR and gene editing technologies, other biotechnologies, what we are shown is always the face of the smiling kind man.
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| 00:32:16.900 |
And I want to know where the scorpion tail is hiding in this new explosion of biotech because I think that there is such a tail that we have to take into account.
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| 00:32:31.900 |
You can take your pick of scorpion tails. I mean as eugenics there is kind of the folly of improving the human being, breeding it for speed or whatever.
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| 00:32:42.900 |
There is also the scorpion tail of the sheer commerce. The numbers of people that will pay thousands and more for a straighter nose or a white or teeth or thicker hair or you name it.
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| 00:32:57.900 |
Oh sure. And here we go back to desire Chris because if we have the means at our disposal to genetically design our own children, how many of them are going to be blonde and tall and athletic, how many of them are going to actually correspond to the Nazi ideal area type.
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| 00:33:21.900 |
I'd say a great many of them, maybe also for memetic reasons, who knows. But I've said this before in company, I've never said it on air, but I'll say that mangele, he will eventually be recognized as a visionary of the 20th century, even though his methods will be condemned and his Nazi affiliations will never be endorsed.
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| 00:33:50.900 |
But the idea is that he had this vision of eugenics that so much of our contemporary biotechnology is following in these mangelean protocols as far as I can tell.
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| 00:34:04.900 |
So I'll throw that out there.
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| 00:34:08.900 |
Wow.
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| 00:34:10.900 |
I'm so fascinated in the applications of one word, mimesis, and imitation. I wanted to take one more crack at another's your ride before we're done. He said fascinatingly, people are against my theory because it is at the same time an avant-garde and a Christian theory.
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| 00:34:31.900 |
The avant-garde people, he said, are anti-Christian and many of the Christians are anti-evon-garde and even the Christians have been very distrustful of me, says Reneejurard, who was a kind of unorthodox Christian, but he became sounded more and more Christian as he moved along.
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| 00:34:49.900 |
Explain that piece, and then I want to hear specifically his thoughts on religion, where worship and churches and a lot of the less savory pieces of it, including scapegoating and sacrifice, are wrapped up in Christ is thinking.
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| 00:35:08.900 |
Yeah, so after he published that book, "To Seat Desire in the Novel in the 60s," in 1972 he published a book called "Violence and the Sacred," and it took people who knew his earlier work very much by surprise because it no longer dealt with the world of literature and the novel.
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| 00:35:27.900 |
He had now become a cultural anthropologist and he was proposing a theory of the violent origins of archaic religions in what he called the scapegoating mechanism, where he imagined these memetic crises, these moments in a pre-historic primitive society where for one reason or another a crisis could be famine, it could be drought or some other natural disaster or just social tension.
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| 00:35:56.900 |
And where everyone now starts imitating the other's hysteria and getting to a point where either that primitive community is going to destroy itself through a war of all against all, but she wrote, I hypothesized that those that avoided that self-immolation did so by identifying rather arbitrarily a scapegoat, one person or subgroup of people who are not
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| 00:35:57.900 |
where everyone now starts imitating the other's hysteria and getting to a point where either
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| 00:36:05.820 |
that primitive community is going to destroy itself through a war of all against all.
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| 00:36:12.240 |
But Shirobert hypothesized that those that avoided that self-immolation did so by identifying
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| 00:36:21.320 |
rather arbitrarily a scapegoat.
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| 00:36:25.260 |
One person or subgroup of people in the community slightly different than the rest and
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| 00:36:30.780 |
blaming them, accusing them of being responsible for the disorder, and through a collective
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| 00:36:39.140 |
lynching of the community of that victim, all of a sudden magically the community was
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| 00:36:46.020 |
healed.
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| 00:36:47.340 |
So an act of unanimous violence leads to the restoration of a spirit of unanimity and
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| 00:36:55.420 |
harmony and order.
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| 00:36:57.380 |
So much so that that victim developed a magical power of healing and was often sacralized.
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| 00:37:07.380 |
And through this mechanism, Shirobert presumed to account for the sacrificial origins of so
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| 00:37:11.580 |
many of the archaic religions.
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| 00:37:13.660 |
This view of Christianity, to come to your question now, was that the gospels in particular,
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| 00:37:21.500 |
Hebrew scriptures also, but more overtly in the Christian gospels, you have a figure in
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| 00:37:32.220 |
Jesus who is a victim of a scapegoat mechanism.
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| 00:37:40.620 |
Yet the difference between the Christian scripture and archaic religions is that it reveals
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| 00:37:45.700 |
the fact that the victim is essentially innocent and that those, the persecutors and the
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| 00:37:52.220 |
lynchers are the guilty ones.
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| 00:37:54.940 |
And therefore, Shirobert believed Christianity in essence was the revelation of the scandal
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| 00:38:00.340 |
of the violent foundations of all previous religions.
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| 00:38:04.660 |
In fact, in Christianity, I believe he says, Christianity in effect undoes religion or
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| 00:38:14.700 |
is it the end of religion or is the last religion?
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| 00:38:17.540 |
Because in fact, there is the flaw in the whole creation of such things.
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| 00:38:21.980 |
Yeah, and I can quote him on that.
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| 00:38:25.220 |
I'm quoting Christianity is not only one of the destroyed religions, but it is the destroyer
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| 00:38:30.420 |
of all religions.
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| 00:38:32.580 |
The death of God is a Christian phenomenon in its modern sense.
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| 00:38:36.380 |
Atheism is a Christian invention.
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| 00:38:40.660 |
And he believed that indeed Christianity eventually put an end to all previous archaic
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| 00:38:50.340 |
violent religions.
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| 00:38:52.420 |
Yeah.
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| 00:38:53.420 |
So, and the strange part about the whole cycle is that Reneejurad came to see the Bible as
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| 00:39:01.580 |
true, true in its observation of anthropology in a way, but really of human history.
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| 00:39:11.260 |
There was a description in this realization of the innocence of the victim.
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| 00:39:16.220 |
There was a real progress, a climb up from barbarity and a response to violence, to the whole
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| 00:39:24.020 |
idea of violence.
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| 00:39:25.020 |
I mean, that's exactly.
|
| 00:39:28.020 |
It's deep.
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| 00:39:29.020 |
It's deep for a podcast, Pogue.
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| 00:39:32.700 |
It is.
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| 00:39:33.700 |
It is.
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| 00:39:34.700 |
Yeah.
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| 00:39:35.700 |
And there's two important aspects.
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| 00:39:38.900 |
One is the notion of the victim and how much of our own contemporary culture is still
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| 00:39:45.140 |
victim obsessed and victim oriented and on the side of the victim.
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| 00:39:50.700 |
And this is from Echerard's point of view, a kind of secularized instantiation of the
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| 00:39:58.660 |
Christian message that the scapegoating of victims is largely in arbitrary and what he
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| 00:40:08.380 |
called satanic phenomena.
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| 00:40:11.620 |
Satan is the other important thing.
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| 00:40:13.860 |
Satan is not a devil.
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| 00:40:16.580 |
Satan is in Hebrew.
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| 00:40:18.540 |
It means the accuser, the prosecutor, the adversary.
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| 00:40:25.300 |
Accus lynchings and scapegoating begin with accusation.
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| 00:40:32.660 |
And that accusation spreads, mimetically, from individual to individual until everyone is
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| 00:40:40.620 |
on the same page in terms of he or she is the guilty one.
|
| 00:40:44.260 |
It could be the which, it could be the, and then through that sort of collective or
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| 00:40:51.380 |
jastic froth comes a murder or some kind of victimization.
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| 00:40:58.180 |
Two millennia of Christianity have made it rather impossible for us to believe anymore
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| 00:41:03.940 |
in the scapegoating mechanism and to believe in the actual guilt of victims.
|
| 00:41:08.940 |
We tend to think that victims are, arbitrarily victimized more often than not.
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| 00:41:15.420 |
And in that sense, Christianity has, yes, it has had a enormous sort of effect on the way
|
| 00:41:22.140 |
we think about these issues.
|
| 00:41:24.780 |
And yet the spirit of accusation has not gone away after two millennia.
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| 00:41:28.820 |
We still belong very much to an accusatory kind of society where we're always pointing
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| 00:41:38.020 |
at someone else.
|
| 00:41:39.020 |
And reciprocal violence is out there too, obviously.
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| 00:41:42.380 |
Oh, yes.
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| 00:41:43.980 |
It's out there.
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| 00:41:44.980 |
And it's not out there only in the tribal warfare of, you know, primitive societies.
|
| 00:41:48.900 |
It's out there, even in the geopolitics of the 20th century in the First World War
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| 00:41:56.460 |
and the Second World War and the US Soviet relations in the Cold War continuing on in
|
| 00:42:04.540 |
our own time, the Middle East, the reciprocal violence seems very alive and well in that regard.
|
| 00:42:12.140 |
And the other great insight of Rizurar is that violence is more, is produced more by
|
| 00:42:20.180 |
sameness, identity rather than difference.
|
| 00:42:23.860 |
It's when the two opponents or enemies or rivals are so identical to one another that
|
| 00:42:29.580 |
you have the greater possibility of violence breaking out.
|
| 00:42:34.900 |
So this insight that identity rather than difference is more responsible for violence is
|
| 00:42:41.380 |
another fundamental insight of his.
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| 00:42:44.740 |
Robert Pocherson, this is totally fascinating to me.
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| 00:42:46.820 |
We haven't even begun on Girard's theory of literature.
|
| 00:42:51.100 |
I mean, the author seems to be disappearing in a lot of postmodern literary studies.
|
| 00:42:57.260 |
He says the author is the story in a writer like Dostevsky, for example, who starts
|
| 00:43:03.060 |
with poor folk and notes from underground and ends up in the kind of exalted spirit of
|
| 00:43:09.580 |
Aoyosha in the brothers Karamatsu.
|
| 00:43:12.100 |
That's one instance.
|
| 00:43:13.180 |
I want to ask you the next time is Girard's body of work in itself autobiographical of
|
| 00:43:19.780 |
his own progress from cynicism toward a kind of exalted, not simple, but ecstatic view
|
| 00:43:29.340 |
of the possibilities.
|
| 00:43:31.420 |
But this will do for the first effort, Pocherson.
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| 00:43:35.420 |
I enjoyed intensely.
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| 00:43:37.220 |
We admire your work hugely on entitled opinions.
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| 00:43:40.540 |
It was wonderful.
|
| 00:43:41.540 |
Well, I hope that I hope the heads aren't going to be spinning too much.
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| 00:43:45.020 |
My it is.
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| 00:43:46.020 |
Yeah.
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| 00:43:47.020 |
But we'll get over it.
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| 00:43:48.020 |
Robert Pocherson.
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| 00:43:49.020 |
Good.
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| 00:43:50.020 |
Good to talk to you.
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| 00:43:51.020 |
Thank you.
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| 00:43:52.020 |
Thank you.
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| 00:43:53.020 |
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