Transcript of Girard Lecture VII | The One Who Withholds

0. Introduction

David Perell: The logic of violence is changing. Once upon a time, our most powerful weapons were sticks and stones. But everything changed during the world wars of the 20th century – where the very technological advances that we once naively believed would liberate man started acting against him. Machine guns, bombers, tanks – The scale, the efficiency, and the brutality of killing were unprecedented.

And yet, we’ve only become more technologically advanced since then. And today, we have nuclear weapons which could destroy the world many times over. And they almost did in close calls such as the Cuban Missile Crisis. In this final lecture, we’re going to focus on Apocalypse. And this may seem old-fashioned – after all, the specter of apocalypse has faded from the public consciousness ever since the fall of the Soviet Union.

But Girard has good reasons to believe that it’s going to make a quick, unsuspected, and devastating return. Let us explore these reasons now.

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Johnathan Bi: We are at the end of our journey, which proves not comedic, but tragic. In this lecture, we will articulate all of the reasons that Girard thinks we’re marching towards inevitable apocalypse. And all these reasons will center around violence – our increased capacity for it, and the increasing inability to contain it.

Three lectures ago, I began by detailing our past – pagan society. After that, we talked about the rupture – Christianity, and the four forces it let loose on history, love, truth, innovation, and violence. In the previous lecture, we examined modernity, contemporary society, under the light of the three good forces, judging it by the standards of the Kingdom of God, and seeing how it did and did not live up to Christian ideals. In this lecture, then, we are going to talk about the near future. We’re going to examine contemporary society under the light of violence, as if it were still a pagan society – still requiring violence and deceit for peace. And this examination will lead us to a terrifying conclusion. We are headed for apocalypse.

This lecture will proceed in three large steps. First, we will understand the fourth and final force that Christianity injects into modernity: violence. Next, we will examine the institutions we have to deal with violence, namely law, capitalism and global trade, and eventually war. Lastly, we will briefly, briefly discuss the solutions that Girard outlines to our apocalyptic moment, how ought one live for inevitable apocalypse – it will be brief, only because Girard does not give us much.

Let us begin with violence.

1. Violence in Modernity

Johnathan Bi: For millennia, human society operated on a cyclical time, whose cycles were demarcated by founding murders. Societies would descend into chaos. Scapegoats would be unconsciously chosen to inherit all the blame and killed. This founding murder would bring back a peace so miraculous that people attributed the saving force to the victim, deifying it. Myths would be created out of this event, and out of these myths spawned the core institutions of pagan societies. Prohibitions prevented violence, and rituals acted as release valves for violence. Of course, both the scapegoating and the deification are equally deceitful. The victim neither had the power to cause nor end the chaos – it’s all a psychological projection by the crowd, grounded on nothing but deceitful unanimity.

This fourfold process is called “The Scapegoat Mechanism” – it’s the foundations of worldly cultures and society. Everywhere Girard looks, he seems to find murdered victims at the origins of worldly power and peace: whether it’s Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus, Julius Caesar, Hymn to Purusha. For Girard, this scapegoat mechanism was deeply ambivalent, a combination of ultimate evil and worldly good: sacrifice one for all; limit freedom of the parts for the stability of the whole; it used violence and lies to establish worldly order.

What is required for its functioning was that its mechanisms remain hidden. Because sacredity and pagan power are based on a deceitful unanimity, the victim’s innocence must remain hidden, lest the whole arbitrariness be exposed and the entire enterprise start crumbling down. For religions to work then, cultures must not know that the source of power of their God actually comes from the psychological projections of the group. This is where Christ comes in. Christ, through the crucifixion, showed precisely the innocence of the victim, the guilt and projection of the crowd, and gave us a moral paradigm through which we can expose, decode, and free ourselves from religion altogether.

The Christian revelation for Girard becomes the rupture of human history. Slowly but surely, humanity is going to lose its ability to create myths out of the deified scapegoat, and with it, the legitimacy of prohibitions – now considered oppressive – and the efficacy of sacrifice – now considered cruel – also begin to deteriorate.

You may be surprised that Girard conceived of violence as one of the forces coming out of Christ’s defeating of the scapegoat mechanism. But given Girard’s understanding of how worldly peace is brought about, this conclusion really should flow naturally. Because, if worldly order, if peaceful society, is founded on a deceitful, violent act of catharsis, then the truth and love that Christianity has unleashed must be harmful for this foundation.

Girard constantly reminds us that Christ himself says as much. Matthew 10:34:

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

Whereas orthodoxy often interprets this as Christ causing local inconveniences, due to the conflict between believers and non-believers, Girard takes Christ literally here, to be saying that he is here to cut down the very pillars of worldly order.

While the consequences of the Christian revelation for Girard are violent and destructive, Christ’s intentions surely are not. He did not cut down the worldly order for the sake of cutting down worldly order, but only so that we may be freed from violence and lies, such that we can love each other. Christ asks us to imitate him in developing unwavering love and an unconditional renunciation of violence in order that we may bring about the kingdom of God in this world – which is only possible if all of us surrender this scapegoat mechanism, if none of us agree to use it and unilaterally we all renounce violence. The problem, however, is that expelling the scapegoat mechanism is only a necessary but not a sufficient condition to engender the kingdom of God in this world. The kingdom of God will only be engendered if all unilaterally renounce violence and develop love. Otherwise, those who have renounced violence will simply be silenced by those who have not – and this is what happened to Christ. While this unilateral renunciation is a logical possibility, it is a statistical impossibility – as likely as if a randomly typing monkey will directly produce the Bible.

Christ only sought to cut down the pillars of worldly order, such that we may have the possibility of realizing the kingdom of God. Christ took off our training wheels so that we may be freed, yet we’ve simply fallen and stumbled. We were given a choice between the kingdom of God and violent apocalypse, and we veered away from the kingdom. For Girard, it is solely our failure in not being able to choose love over violence that now leaves us stranded without the scapegoat mechanism to deal with violence at all.

David Perell: But scapegoating is unfortunately alive and well in contemporary society. Have we been freed from it?