The Contagion of Girardianism
November 25, 2005
J. Bottum has been a reader of René Girard for some time. Bottum’s latest writings suggest that he is in fact a Girardian. In the most generous consideration, I would say Girard’s work is like Marxism (and perhaps cut from the same cloth). Both are brilliant in analysis but terribly wrong about the conclusions and prescriptions implied by the analysis. Girard’s publications were extraordinarily insightful up to the late 70s or the point when he wedded his view of the scapegoat with Christ and the Gospels within a crude Hegelianesque notion of history.
For Girard, the scapegoat–or any bit of socially sanctioned “good” violence done out of the idea that it helps the group–is a demonic invention of rank injustice. This is quite true as far as it goes. (Though at times it appears Girard believes Satan is no more than the scapegoat function and those possessed by it.) Girard and many Girardians–Bottum among them, it seems–go further. They see the Gospel as essentially a deconstruction or demythologization of scapegoating and institutions based on the sacralization of violence–such as the modern state. Unable to fathom or bear the thought that the scapegoat might be the tragically necessary demonic shadow of the City of Man, they may denounce all violence or merely the traditional forms of socially sanctioned violence; e.g., war and capital punishment. Some may not consider that a society without these tools might be destroyed from within and without, resulting in an anarchy of more and worse violence. Or they may be more “optimistic,” imagining that a society that swore off violence would be rather utopian, perhaps the very Kingdom of God realized in history.
These are at least the attitudes I have encountered in print and in various interactive backwaters of the inter-web. In Girardian circles (rather marginal assemblages of cranks on par with allegedly Intelligent Designists) one typically finds clergy and humanities professors using Girard’s insights to launch intellectually thin blasts against Capitalism or to pad otherwise shopworn arguments for gay marriage. They tend to share a reductive gnostico-liberal construction of Christianity (or perhaps merely the Protestant heresies) where the true apprehension of the gospel must progressively impel all it touches toward pure pacifism. Indeed there’s a whiff of Anabaptistry and Antinomian temptation in the idea that the true apprehension of the gospel must progressively impel all it touches toward pure pacifism and, for some, a realm of ultimate “freedom” and “tolerance” that looks more to me like a matter of defining deviance down. Fortunately Bottum has no truck with this lot as far as I know (i.e. leftist and gay rights Girardians), but what he shares with them in his assumptions and premises is distressing nevertheless.
I will say it is not incorrect to note the Gospel has had a strong, liberalizing, anti-imperial impact in western society. It is a real but undertheorized phenomenon that is handled very simplistically by Girard et al. Girard simply assumes, as does Bottum, that the non-violent aspect of the Gospel is the divinely sanctioned, correct interpretation of the whole Gospel. People of this mind also tend to assume that correct biblical interpretation implies a rule for life, or at least a rule for political life. This doesn’t work when one faces the persistent reality (or appearance in the Bible) of violent, evil people who really need to be shot. Luther and Augustine’s much derided two-kingdom theory starts to look pretty good then. Even the Grand Inquisitor himself starts to sound sensible. This situation is not psychically tolerable for many people who need to believe that God, the Bible, good intentions, and/or political theory X offer us a body of principles that, if applied in the political sphere, would sustain a society in which one would almost never have to choose lesser evils or justify immoral means with moral ends. Such people want and are able to believe that these kinds of infernal, damning bargains are lies and swindles that may be refused by those who bear worldly power. They want and are able to believe this because they have been removed, by means of various opiates (including forms of Christianity) and phantasms, from the ever-Machiavellian realities of the world. Their condition is, in the end, the real problem.
This is The Contagion of Girardianism in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: The Therapy of Order | Next: Blogging Kills | TrackBack (2) | Comments (0)
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