The Jesus Principle in Theory & Practice
Understanding René Girard's Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World
Image by Michelle Horsley
(Audio version at the end of piece for paid subscribers)
Part One: That Obscure Obstacle of Desire
Scapegoat as Attention Magnet
The scapegoat mechanism is very simple. Everybody knows it. When you have problems, find somebody to blame and then get rid of them, or just make them take the blame in such a way that it resolves the problem.
Specifically, this has to do with relationships within a community, within a group or within a family, where there is disagreement, tension, and potential violence. It has to do with mimesis and mimetic desire.
Mimetic desire is when everybody starts wanting the same thing and fighting over it, leading to violence. Having a scapegoat means that, instead of everybody directing their anger against each other, it all gets directed against one person. The gaze of the group is unified by putting its attention on one object—an object not of desire but of hostility.
Christ on the cross is a visual image of the scapegoat, and the image of the crucifixion has captured the collective gaze of humanity for hundreds of years, albeit without much understanding of what it actually means.
It’s understood that Christ was innocent. Christ was good and he was murdered. But it’s misunderstood (or at least over-simplified) as a sacrifice for our sins. By framing Christ’s death as the ultimate sacrificial ritual, a new culture of the sacred was created around that image.
This is essentially what Girard is talking about: cultures come about, civilizations arise, upon a religious foundation; and that religious foundation is built on the body of an innocent victim who is represented as a sacrifice.
The innocence of the victim is hidden because they’re scapegoated; but then, as if to compensate, they’re eventually lifted up as a divine image, because of the awareness that their death has kept the community together, allowing it to grow.
Girard’s thesis is simply that all cultures are founded and maintained on the sacrifice of an innocent, and that this includes our own.
Mimetic Rivals: Oshana & I
Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, mimetic rivalry, and mimetic violence can be applied at both microcosmic and macrocosmic levels.
In our personal lives, we’re drawn towards models of behavior, people to emulate whom we feel have qualities that we want to develop, or who have attained goals we wish to attain. My own experience has involved a series of such models, most recently Dave Oshana, but before that John De Ruiter, and before that Carlos Castaneda, Whitley Strieber, David Byrne, David Bowie, Clint Eastwood, Elvis: all figures I’ve admired, and to some degree tried to be.
As long as these relationships remain parasocial (one-way relationships), and the gulf between ourselves and our role models is wide enough that there’s no possibility of actual competition (or of any kind of actual relationship), then they can be healthy and fruitful. The closer these models get to us, however, the more volatile the relationship becomes.
Even when they are entirely parasocial, if we begin to approach the same level of accomplishment, virtue, or talent that we have appreciated in the model (in our own minds, at least), the model becomes of less and less interest to us. We might say we’ve outgrown them, a relatively benign development, even if we end up disillusioned. But in the case of a close relationship, chances are it ends with some sort of rivalry and conflict, if not actual violence.
This played out with John De Ruiter and myself: he didn’t accept any kind of personal relationship, but that didn’t stop me from getting to know him personally, digging more and more into his background, his personal history, and writing a book exposing his peccadillos to the world.
Then, with Dave Oshana, we did have a personal relationship—anyone observing it would have called it that—and it ended with a very overt sort of rivalry between us, and with me essentially being scapegoated by Oshana.
Girard describes the dynamic clearly in Things Hidden:
Let us take a very simple example, if you like, that of the Master and his disciples. The Master is delighted to see more and more disciples around him and delighted to see that he is being taken as a model. Yet if the imitation is too perfect and the imitator threatens to surpass the model, the Master will completely change his attitude and begin to display jealousy, mistrust and hostility. He will be tempted to do everything he can to discredit and discourage his disciple. The disciple can only be blamed for being the best of all disciples. He admires and respects the model. If he had not done so, he would hardly have chosen him as model in the first place. So inevitably he lacks the necessary distance to put what is happening to him in perspective. He does not recognize the signs of rivalry in the behavior of the model. It is all the more difficult for the disciple to do so because the model tries very hard to reinforce this blindness. The model tries his best to hide the real reasons for his hostility (p. 278).
This passage precisely describes (one interpretation of) what happened between Oshana and me. I became the model of my model, the one who best modeled the guru, and so I became a model to others in the group, a sort of transitional model between Oshana—with his seemingly unattainable and incomprehensible state of enlightenment—and themselves (most specifically with the men’s group I ran).
In the end, I was singled out by Oshana: not for being transgressive, but for getting too close to matching him, and thereby undermining his authority and his exclusivity. This was complementary with my own feelings that it was time to leave, however, it being a poor disciple who does not surpass (or at least attain independence from) his master.
Girard would say this is just what happens, and that it’s largely unconscious and incomprehensible at the time. He might also say that the victim, the scapegoat, is the only one who really knows what’s happening, because he or she is the only one who knows that they’re innocent.
This was the main test for me. Like Job, I knew I was innocent. This is also, as it happens, how Children of Job got its name; even how or why it began.
After the dust-up with Oshana, I started reading about the book of Job in a book by Jack Miles called God. I had got bored of the book a year or so before (because a lot of the Old Testament bores me), and so I skipped to the chapter on the book of Job. Certain passages coincided so precisely with my experience with Oshana, with him in the role of God and myself as Job, that I began to write about it.
And here we are.
When your desire-model is somebody you’ve trusted, who has earned your trust, and they try to convince you that you are guilty, it’s very hard to side with your own conscience over such an external voice of trusted authority. This is the nature of Job’s challenge, and really, his calling.
Job has to appear to defy God in order to be true to what his conscience tells him is true. It is “the place where faith and hubris meet.”1
(Over the Paywall: Why We Have to Destroy All Our Heroes)
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