Transcript of Girard Lecture IV | The Scapegoat Mechanism

0. Introduction

David Perell: One of my favorite stories growing up was the Iliad – the famous Greek poem about the Trojan War. It explores timeless themes that Girard covers so closely, such as the way that envy and vengeance can strip us of considered reason, and how even small and localized acts of violence can escalate into all-out war.

Reading the Iliad, I’ve always wondered: When violence erupts and emotions are stirred, how do we establish peace? And then, in those moments of peace, where does social cohesion come from? Enlightenment philosophers would lead us to believe that in the middle of such a war of all-against-all that we can establish some rational social contract, but Girard’s answer is… scapegoating.

This is not as foreign an idea as it may initially sound. And though we no longer sacrifice goats, the logic of scapegoating is alive in the modern world. And though we like to tell ourselves that we’ve reached a post-Enlightenment world driven by logic and reason, we’re still looking for people to blame and ostracize.

In this lecture, we’re going to examine what really lies at the foundations of worldly peace and order.

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Johnathan Bi: In the next four lectures, we will cover the entirety of Girard’s philosophy of history, and we will see how the psychological and inter-dividual mechanisms – mimesis, metaphysical desire, and mimetic rivalry – that we have uncovered in the last two lectures, how they will interplay and manifest in different historical conditions. Girard’s history, if you can believe it, is even more ambitious and encompassing than his psychology. Girard believes that he has uncovered the key logic of human social and even biological evolution that begins from the first human culture and that will eventually lead us towards apocalypse, the literal end of the world. Girard’s history can be broken down into four large movements. The past: Pagan society. The rupture: Christian revelation. The present: Modernity. And the near future: Apocalypse.

And so in this lecture, we will begin where history begins and where Girard also begins, pagan society, our past. By pagan, what I’m referring to are societies that are not Christian, but more specifically pre-Christian. When I say pagan, think the Greeks and their gods, or the Romans and their pantheon, shamanistic societies, or Hinduism.

The defining feature of all of these pagan societies, and all the ones of course that I haven’t mentioned, is their religion. And we will spend the entirety of the lecture today covering the form and origin of pagan religion. We are going to learn how pagan gods are made, and even stronger, what lies at the very foundation of all pagan societies.

But before we can even begin to inquire what form religion takes, we need to understand the problem which religion is the solution to. Girard takes a Darwinian stance on the evolution of human societies, arguing that if religions exist across the spectrum, everywhere, it must serve like the lizard’s tail that breaks off in an emergency, some adaptive purpose. Girard’s claim is going to be that human groups are prone to escalating conflict which tends towards self-destruction – what he called reciprocal violence. Reciprocal violence threatened all hominoid groups… to the point where the only ones that survived were the ones that stumbled upon a cultural process as a solution: pagan religion. Religion is to humanity then what the tail is to lizards – a necessary survival mechanism. So let us begin there, and start with the problem which religion is the solution for… reciprocal violence.

1. The Trojan War and Reciprocal Violence

Johnathan Bi: To understand what Girard has in mind with reciprocal violence, let us look at the Trojan War, which is a fitting place, I think, to begin Girard’s history, for it is the genesis of Western culture.

The Trojan War begins when the Spartan king’s wife, Helen, is seduced by his guest, Paris, the Prince of Troy, and Paris takes Helen back to Troy. Immediately, I must highlight that the conflict which ignites the Trojan War is none other than mimetic desire. After all, Paris, as a prince, could have had almost anyone that he wanted, yet what he wanted most was an object designated by a model. Out of all the women that Paris could have had, he wanted what the Spartan king had. Indeed, the mimetic nature of desire is why Girard thinks conflict is so likely among human societies – it makes us naturally desire a similar set of objects, even when we have plentiful other options available to us.

But let’s continue to observe how this one local act of conflict, or more abstractly, violence, spirals into an uncontrollable contagion. First, we have the events of the Iliad as told by Homer. Furious by the actions of the Trojan prince, the Greeks siege Troy for vengeance and to win back their wounded honor. To do so, the Greeks assembled an armageddon of heroes, the most notable being Agamemnon, Odysseus, Ajax, and of course, Achilles.

The whole story of the Iliad is about Achilles’ decision – a will he/won’t he fight in the Trojan War. Because, you see, the Iliad begins with the Greeks on Trojan shores having made little progress. And Achilles is pissed off and doesn’t really want to join his fellow Greeks. He leans towards abandoning them and going home. But reciprocal violence has a way, like a disease, like a plague, of enveloping everyone too close, contagiously spreading to all who are too proximate. Just observe how more and more people get caught up in the violence of the events of the Iliad. First, the Greeks siege the walls of Troy. In response, the Trojans burn the Greek ships. Then the Greeks kill Trojan heroes. And importantly, Hector, the other prince of Troy, the brother of Paris who stole Helen, he kills Patroclus, Achilles’ best friend. Achilles, then, fueled with burning rage, eventually enters the war and kills Hector. Of course, the story we all know too well is that eventually Achilles himself meets his demise, shot by an arrow to the heel. Reciprocal violence then, is like a disease that gets to all who are too close, even if they never wanted to participate.

But this violence, spawned by Paris’ act of stealing Helen, is not only between the Trojans and the Greeks. There is an interesting story told by Sophocles about the aftermath of Achilles’ death, where there is infighting and internal mimetic rivalries going on within the ranks of the Greeks and not just between the Greeks and the Trojans. The story goes like this. Odysseus and Ajax are arguing over who gets to keep the armor of Achilles – the armor of Achilles is made by Hephaestus, the armor-smith god, and as a result is very desirable. Odysseus, being the cunning man he is, wins the armor and out of a fit of rage and hallucination induced by Athena, Ajax, the other competitor, ends up ending his own life and cursing the rest of the Greeks with whom he had fought side by side for, for almost an entire decade. The idea here is that when societies are enveloped in reciprocal violence, tensions are so inflamed that they can be easily redirected to anyone, even one’s own teammates. Not only is violence contagious, but violence is also blind. It’s simply looking for trouble for something and someone to sink its teeth into.