The Tablet: The distortion of René Girard
René Girard has been mentioned a lot of late in many ACP posts. Check out this article in The Tablet by Michael Kirwan. (Registration required).
The ideas of the French social theorist and critic are being actively twisted by influential figures around President Donald Trump
René Girard (1923-2015) is one of the most significant Catholic thinkers of recent times. At the core of his “mimetic theory” is his discernment of a connecting pattern between a certain kind of social formation – the mobilisation of one group over against another, or against a vulnerable victim – and the sacred imagination. He argues that this construction of an identity “over against” lies at the heart of much religious behaviour.
That article gets better as it goes along, but I would not have begun it in that way. Girard is much clearer in giving a name to the ‘all against one’ theme that recurs in scripture – and history – so often – ‘scapegoating’ – and in arguing that, as an exposure of the injustice of scapegoating, the Bible has no peer in ancient literature.
That’s why e.g. JD Vance is deluded in thinking of himself as a Girardian – when he can cruelly and consciously support the fiction that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were ‘eating the dogs’ – in Trump’s foul imagination. Trumpism is centrally a scapegoating ideology, even an echo of the lynching epidemic in the south following the US Civil War of 1861-65.
Nevertheless Michael Kirwan’s intro to Girard (‘Discovering Girard’), is one of the best.
That we tend to derive our desires by unconscious imitation is Girard’s central insight, along with the idea that this problem inevitably causes conflict when the desired object cannot be shared – e.g. a kingship. That likely rivals can then, to avoid a mutually destructive conflict with one another, ‘pick on’ a likely third party is the classic pattern that he discerns in history, the bible and even current Great Power jostlings.
To my mind the grisliest example is the Yalta agreement of 1945 on the fate of the White Russians – the anti-Bolsheviks who had sided with Germany in World War II. The postwar peace rested upon their extermination by Stalin, with allied British officers handing over imprisoned white Russians in eastern Europe to the Russians. What followed was awful.
What might happen to Ukraine at the hands of Putin and Trump could be far worse. Does Trump even care?
Why did Christian bishops lose this understanding of ‘covetousness’ after Constantine? Because Constantine was obviously himself a mimetic rival, and imperialism thrives on covetousness, but no one could say so. Letting covetousness rip is the very definition of pride (e.g. Henry II and the invasion of Ireland in 1171) but no one could say that either. That’s how Catholic moral theology became so unbalanced, fixated on sex.
YouCat’s blanking of pride and covetousness, while detailing the birth regulation rules imposed by Humanae Vitae in 1968, is a classic example. How else could that book wind up attributing the death of Jesus solely to the will of God? Constantinian theology dressed up as supreme piety! That it totally lacks any hint of insight into the genealogy of violence shows that Girardian insight is still both lacking in, yet sorely needed by, the ‘magisterium’.