“Reading the Bible With Rene Girard" is a book that explores how the Bible can help us understand human nature and the way we interact with each other. According to Girard, who was a philosopher and literary critic, the Bible reveals a lot about how violence and competition exist in society, but it also offers a way to overcome them.
One of the main themes of the book is something called mimetic desire, which means that we're not really in control of our desires because they're influenced by the people around us. We want what other people want because we're imitating their desires. This can lead to conflict and rivalry because we're all competing for the same thing.
Another thing the book talks about is scapegoating, which is when people blame a single person or group for everything that's wrong in society. Girard says that this has been happening throughout history, but the Bible offers a different way of thinking about it. It shows us that we don't have to keep doing this, and that there's a way to break the cycle of violence.
One of the coolest things about the book is that it reminds us that the Bible is actually a book about victims, written by victims. It focuses a lot on the experiences of people who have been oppressed or marginalized, and it offers a message of hope to those who have suffered.
Overall, "Reading the Bible With Rene Girard" is a really interesting book that helps us see the Bible in a new way. It shows us how we can learn from it to make the world a better place, and how we can use its messages of forgiveness and reconciliation to heal the conflicts that are tearing us apart.
Some quotes from the book that I liked:
what Cervantes wanted to show us is a character who is carried away by his dream, but his dream is not really his own: his dream is about the books he’s read. To quote the song from Man of La Mancha, Don Quixote has an “impossible dream.” Now, if you look at many characters in the nineteenth century, they have real models, live models: they see a gentleman who has more money or prestige, who is a little bit older than them, and they imitate him. They are going to fall in love with the same girl. So the relationship between Don Quixote and all the other novels is that desire is not independent, not rooted in the self, or in the object.
Popular views have taught us that our desires should be independent from other people, should be rooted in ourselves, but even that idea is not really ours; it’s the idea of the whole of society. It is still repeated ad nauseam in the world today and believed by most people. But a great novelist will show you that it's not true, that there is either a book behind the desire or a live individual, which can amount to pretty much the same thing.
You can see these bad sentiments that are ultimately the same on both sides, because as the model is imitated, he starts imitating his own imitator. Therefore you have a vicious circle of imitation that gets worse and worse between model and rival, which is typical of the world of politics, and even the world of scholarship. Scholars can be rivals of each other. Competition is the essence of our world; competition is essentially mimetic. So in a way the story of mimetic desire is a historical one: it's the story of the evolution of desire in the Western world.
We feel we're constantly moving toward more happiness as we become more equal, but in fact we're always moving towards more rivalry.
mimetic desire is not a literary truth only. It is about human beings. Now, animals have appetites; they don’t have any desires as we do, as we would like to think sometimes, but they do have appetites. These appetites lead to certain types of rivalries. We know, for instance, that deer and many other animals compete with each other; the males compete for a female and therefore they desire the same object. But they don’t kill each other. When they fight, one of the two animals, as a rule, surrenders to the other one. This is very important today in studies of animal behavior, because it creates a permanent relationship between what is called the dominant animal and the dominated animal; what we call animal society is simply made up of pairs or groups of dominant and dominated animals. It always happens in the field this way: there is no social system that is independent like the one we have as humans. So we talk about animal societies because the relationships are uneven or differentiated. They have dominant animals that choose everything they want: food, females, and so on. The dominated animals have to be satisfied with what is left over. Human beings obviously have the same type of struggle in their rivalries, but it doesn't end with
Why are we more violent? We have a greater mimetic impulse, and that mimetic impulse that turns us into rivals; our imitation is more intense than the animal imitation. This is probably, in my view, decisive in the definition of humanity, because this greater power of imitation is both the driver of our intelligence, our ability to learn from others, and also accounts for our violence, our rivalries, and the fact that we kill one another. Rivalries in human beings don’t end with a dominant-dominated pattern; rather, they end with vengeance.
What is vengeance? I kill you, but after I've killed you, your brother may decide to kill me; after your brother kills me my brother will decide to kill my killer, and so it goes on endlessly. Vengeance is mimetic violence in its purest expression; it is pure mimesis, pure violence. Imitation becomes so intensely widespread that it transcends time and place, and can become a way of life. Societies cannot sustain that because if everything becomes vengeance, everybody dies. At the same time, however, vengeance – in our case social retribution – is the greatest duty, and calls forth the greatest prohibition. Human societies are contradictory: they must prohibit vengeance, because it would destroy them, but vengeance is so bad that if you commit it the victim will have to avenge it. Here we see the contradiction of human society; vengeance is both the greatest duty and the greatest prohibition of human societies. Many societies struggle with this; archaic societies struggled with it a great deal. But you can see that there is an imbalance in humans; we are too intelligent for our own good.
The idea of social contract is an absurdity: it means that humans are rational enough to have an agreement that they will all subsequently respect. This is not true.
The need for the social contract is inevitably associated with conflict, with the inability of people to get along together. If conflict occurs, when people are fighting together, this is the moment when it is most impossible to sit together at a table and discuss a social contract. I think that human society is inevitably linked to violence: the creation of a society is the resolution of a violent conflict.
Foundational myths are myths that recount the foundation of a community. Do they have something to say to us that is valuable? I think so, but many people do not agree. Many of these myths – I wouldn't say all, because they can be tampered with in innumerable ways – are structured in the same fashion, where there is a big crisis in the community.
After this crisis, there always comes a collective form of violence against a single individual, or something similar. In many myths all over the world the violence is collective. When the victim is killed, it is discovered that the victim is a god, peace comes back, order is restored, and voilà: society is founded. So how can we interpret these things?
We can assume that as the mimetic fighting increases, it involves the entire community. What does that mean? It means that if you have two people imitating each other, fighting for the same object, the attractiveness of that object for the third individual is greater. When you have three people it becomes even greater, then you have four, then five, and pretty soon you have the entire community fighting for the same object. But when the whole community is fighting for the same object; that object is going to be torn apart or destroyed, so what will happen next? There is a tendency for people not to stop fighting each other even when the object has dropped out of the picture, because that’s what they're doing anyway. If you're fighting for the same object you can never be reconciled with your opponent. But if you're fighting the same enemies, if many people are fighting each other, it's very easy to share the same enemy with someone else, so the mimetic influx tends to shift from objects to the antagonists themselves. When this happens, we need to describe the process carefully and in detail, but I'm not sure I can. Roughly speaking, this is what happens when the conflict shifts from an object of imitated desire to the antagonists themselves. You have more and more antagonists choosing the same antagonist, no longer being contaminated in terms of the desiring object but in terms of their choice of antagonists. Then, when this happens, there comes a moment when everybody is against the same antagonist, a single antagonist. So when a single antagonist has everybody against him, he's going to die, to be killed. Then, at least for a brief moment, no one in the group
The death of the last antagonist will automatically reconcile the group, because it will be the antagonist of everybody; therefore, peace will suddenly return because of this victim. In the eyes of the group, this victim seems to be responsible for the whole trouble; but he is also responsible, through his death, for the reconciliation. Therefore this victim seems all-powerful, for good and evil; that victim is at first seen as ‘God.’ The victim seems to be the master of the crisis; she resolves it through her death. Just as this victim was deemed responsible for violence, so also the victim is responsible for the return of peace when everybody joins together against her. So we have a situation that is suddenly one of peace, and the community rejoices. The community is freed from the crisis, but this freedom is not going to last.
Mimetic rivalry will come back over other objects. Then the people will remember that a victim saved them, and they’ll try to do the same thing again. They will deliberately choose other victims and kill them collectively in the hope that this will reconcile them again. It does, mimetically; this is the invention of ritual sacrifice.
Sacrifice is repeating the event that has saved the community from its own violence, which is killing a victim. Sacrifice changes its modus operandi very quickly; there are very few contemporary examples of sacrifice that are truly collective, though some have been observed in Africa. Usually one encounters a single priest. Sacrifice can be modified in countless ways. But the principle of sacrifice is that it belongs to the entire community, which kills a victim in order to reconcile the community with itself. All over the world in every culture, the sacrificers will tell you what they imitate and that some god provided the model. We should take that very seriously, because it's a reference to the initial mimetic process that resolved the crisis, which was real. So sacrifice works, and since people want to continue it, people pay a great deal of attention to it. Cultures are very careful to imitate the original phenomenon very faithfully, with deliberately selected victims who replace the original victim, who replace the god; in other words, the animal or human being sacrificed is a substitute for the god.
When you start to have periodic rituals, you have a kind of religious order, you have ceremonies, and you have a community. So the human community is fundamentally different from the animal society because it needs ritual in order to vanquish mimetic disorder.
The decadence of culture occurs when all classifications become mixed, when people make no distinctions between anything, when everyone is alike. There are striking descriptions of this in the Vedic scriptures thousands of years ago. If you look at the tragic crisis as described by Euripides, you see the same thing: men become women, women become men. It's a description that’s mind-boggling. Violence, of course, is born out of it, but violence will produce the scapegoat that will recreate differences and order as well. So culture, like its founding mechanism of sacrifice, is cyclical.
Sacrifice is the lightning rod for the community’s violence, because it mobilizes the whole community against a fake enemy, who is not a member of the community, thus preventing people in the community from killing each other. It is a ceremony of unity, with all that violent symbolism, against a victim who is and is not part of the community.
You don’t talk about it in terms of scapegoating. Only the Gospels can do that: because they don’t believe in it, they tell you that Jesus is a scapegoat. When you say that someone is a scapegoat, he is not your scapegoat. To have a scapegoat is to be unaware that you have a scapegoat, to think he really is guilty. It's so simple that people don’t understand it. Scapegoating is effective only if it is nonconscious. Then you do not call it scapegoating; you call it justice.
The media always take people who debunk Christianity seriously. They will never take seriously any thesis that does the opposite, one that debunks modernity. They should. But they won’t.
We’ve been totally unfaithful to our real inheritance. We don’t want to understand it. We misconstrue it in one way or another. We turn it either into some kind of pop story or into a vengeance story like the other side. But we don’t want to see the greatness of it, the real greatness of it.
What is visible in our future is the incredible variance of war because of technology.
When people start worshipping words like “modern,” making things more relevant, you can be sure that they are shifting away from God, who is judged or regarded as outmoded relative to some more modern god, which always turns out to be the serpent. It always advises us to do the same thing. In other words, the only interesting objects are the ones that have been banned by God. In fact, they are not interesting at all. When Adam and Eve eat the apple, they gain nothing and they lose everything. They lose paradise. So this is very important for me, of course, because when people ask me what is mimetic desire in religious terms, my tendency is to say it's original sin. It's what's specific to humanity. Previously, I said humanity is more intelligent because it's more mimetic. But that means when it's exposed to evil, it can be good or it can also be evil. The one and the other go together.
In the mimetic theory, when you have a crisis where people tend to desire the same thing, ultimately they all fight together. The tendency to desire the same thing turns into the tendency to pick a victim who seems to be the enemy of all, who is disliked by all rivals, because when you desire the same object, you can never get along. You’re always divided. But when you start hating people, if someone hates someone else, you can share an enemy. You cannot share a desired object, but sharing an enemy is the human sport par excellence. It's called politics. This is what happens very early and mysteriously. Well, not so mysteriously: if everybody unites against a victim, they will kill that victim and, at least for a brief moment, the community will be without enemies. Everybody will be friends, and of course the community is amazed. The community does not understand what has happened. The community is enormously moved by its own violence. It's what the Greeks call catharsis, and so the people are kind of frozen by their own murder. They call this peace. Unfortunately, this peace is not permanent. Its effects will last for a while but not forever. So what are these people going to do? All they know is that they have been reconciled by the victim, by killing the victim together. So I think it's a first "intelligent" motion of human beings. Why not kill another victim together? Therefore, you are going to deliberately choose a victim and kill that victim solemnly. This is the institution we call sacrifice.
This is the expression of a fundamental jealousy that is the human hostility to other human beings par excellence. What I call mimetic rivalry we could also call envy or jealousy. That's what it means. What is it to be envious? It is to desire the object someone else possesses and you don't. So envy is very definitely mimetic desire. Mimetic desire shows us its birth and its incredible abundance in human society. People always desire what other people have that they don't have. Sacrificial violence produces a salutary fear and, at the same time, a desire to perpetuate the effect of it. But in order to perpetuate the effect of it, you have to redo it. You redo it artificially. So sacrifice is the first technique, the first cultural invention of man. It's not a pure invention. It's an imitation of a spontaneous happening.
Culture is the way human beings live together. We’ve talked previously about the fact that the building block of animal culture is what the specialists today call dominance patterns; these are seen in physical encounters, for example, between wild wolves. The male wild wolves vie for the same female, but there is no death; there is surrender. When wolves fight this type of fight, the defeated wolf lies on his back and offers his throat to the victor, who does not kill him but becomes the dominant animal. So we can assume that the threshold of hominization is when this no longer happens but the killing of the submissive rival occurs. In human culture, when dominance patterns cannot be established, this killing is going to occur at some point collectively because of the contagion, the mimetic contamination, which directs a certain number of people against the same victim. It is these people who are going to be the first community, who are going to be united by their victim, who become the first model for sacrifice. Culture is always essentially repeating these sacrifices, remembering the first victim. But the word “remember” in English is interesting. In order to put the members of a victim that has been torn apart back together, you re-member the victim. Then, when you sacrifice, you re-member again. Therefore, culture is essentially remembrance; so you can see that even in modern languages, words can be very useful to teach you what's behind them if you use them in the right way.
Competition is infinite. Competition is a rise to extremes. As von Clausewitz says, “for war.”[80] In competition, someone is always losing. So the one who is losing will not give up competition. The one who is winning would like to end it. This is true especially among nations. Now we have peace and we enjoy the fruit of what we’ve won, but it doesn’t happen that way. It continues on and on; therefore, it’s going to ultimately have bad results. It will be unleashed one hundred percent.
We may be in a period of decadence that’s very different from the decadence of the Roman Empire in the sense that it’s decadence through excess activity. We know that in the Roman Empire economic production had a tendency to spiral downward. Things had a tendency towards immobility. Whereas today, with us, it’s just irrational activity and downright loss of control over the ambitions of individuals and groups that produces not only industrial development, but wars. Today, humanity is incapable of moderation because it’s lost all rules. It’s moving towards the absolute unknown. It doesn’t even know what the results of future scientific discoveries will be. We know that right now, according to most scientists, we’re exceeding the possibilities that are necessary for the preservation of the natural environment. The earth is being endangered. We don’t seem to be able to react because individual ambition, competition and national ambitions are so powerful.
For instance, the Chinese aren’t going to stop having more cars until they have exactly the same percentage that we have in this country or in Europe, which is sheer madness. It was sheer madness with us, but it was obvious that it was going to be imitated. Now, it’s being imitated not only in China, but also in India. Apparently expansion is beginning to run wild in India, because they’re mastering technology and discovering new things as well. In other words, the Western world is expanding to the whole planet. Is that possible? We know it isn’t. Or we think it isn’t. Maybe we think that it isn’t because we want to keep it to ourselves. Who knows? That’s what the Chinese and the Indians certainly think.