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Victims, violence and the sacred: the thought of Rene Girard - includes bibliographies of books by and about Girard - Cover Story
Christian Century, Dec 11, 1996 by Leo D. Lefebure
At last, however, the message has begun to register. According to Girard, modern movements on behalf of oppressed peoples, even though often outside or opposed to established Christianity, are the heirs of the Hebrew prophets and the New Testament. As Friedrich Nietzsche noted, Christianity sides with victims, not conquerors.
Prior to biblical revelation, Girard claims, cultures achieved relative levels of social stability through scapegoating certain individuals. Over the centuries the impact of the gospel on culture has largely destroyed the power of the surrogate victim mechanism. Conventional culture is now in a painful process of disintegration. History as we have known it for millennia is coming to an end, and we face a dramatic, even apocalyptic, choice: total destruction or total renunciation of violence.
What is striking about Girard's proposal is the wide range of data that do bear the hallmarks of mimetic rivalry and the surrogate victim mechanism. The insights of great novelists and dramatists into the volatility of mimetic desire, as interpreted by Girard, are profound and persuasive on an intuitive level. Similarly, the analysis of the surrogate victim mechanism can find much evidence in a wide range of cultures. It is frightening to note how often social bonding has taken place through the exclusion of certain groups and through periodic violence directed at unfortunate individuals. Lynch mobs and pogroms punctuate human history.
When mimetic theory is extrapolated into the explanation of all institutions of all human cultures, however, doubts arise about the status of the evidence and the assumptions of the argument. Too often discussions of Girard tend toward an all-or-nothing choice: either uncritical enthusiasm or skeptical dismissal. It is helpful to distinguish between the intuitive power of Girard's proposal, which can be quite compelling, and the logical status of many of the claims advanced, which remains problematic. Girard has proposed a hypothesis which is most intriguing, but it has by no means reached the stage of empirical verification, and in many cases it is difficult to see how verification could be achieved.
The theory of the primal murders and the primordial origin of religion and all human culture in the surrogate victim mechanism is highly speculative because we lack adequate data from the period that Girard takes as foundational for all human culture. Girard seeks to reconstruct a form of mimesis prior to symbols, a mimesis which would take place as the origin of human consciousness and of culture and religious symbolism. However, there remains a gap between what we can reconstruct of the primitive drives of hominids and the emergence of higher cognitive and symbolic capacities. Girard claims to have found the missing link, but one wonders whether the power of mimesis and the effect of the primal murders can really account for the entire range of development of early humans. Was the surrogate victim mechanism really the motor driving the development of the human brain in interaction with cultural factors, as Girard claims? How can we possibly know?
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