The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims. – René Girard
Myths are horrifying.
Take Prometheus. In short, Prometheus was a Greek god who stole fire and gave it to humans. For this crime, he was bound to a rock, where an eagle would come to rip out and consume his liver. The next day, his liver would grow back, so the eagle would come again and feast again. And so on, for eternity.
Most paintings of this scene fail to capture the mood correctly.
It’s an easy story to tell, but it’s difficult to really grasp. The punishment is cruel, for the crime of theft (of a non-excludable good, no less!). This is fairly typical of mythology, and completely unconcerning as long as you don’t take the story at all seriously. I remember, when I first heard of Prometheus, imagining that gods were some sort of super-men with abnormally high pain tolerance. The alternative is unimaginable.
René Girard wants us to imagine the alternative: that mythic punishments were not invented from whole cloth, but are instead slightly dramatized versions of real, historical incidents. Prometheus was a real person, who committed some serious crime (perhaps theft), and was punished by some form of bodily mutilation. In retellings, every aspect of the story has been exaggerated. Notably, though, those retelling the myth rarely feel the need to make the punishment fit the crime.
Another charming example: Ixion. Ixion was, originally, a mortal King of little note. Here’s a picture of Ixion, tied to a flaming wheel, sent spinning through the skies (again, for eternity).
Okay, so the punishment is a bit extreme. What was the crime? He attempted to seduce Hera—Zeus’s wife. By the standards of Greek mythology, this makes sense. But maybe the listener wants more. Well, more there is! While a mortal king, Ixion married a woman and failed to pay her father an appropriate price. This feud escalated until Ixion finally killed he father-in-law. Exiled from his community, Ixion is driven mad with guilt, until Zeus eventually takes pity on him and brings him up to Mount Olympus to join the gods.
Now we have a crime vaguely fitting the punishment. Ixion is a murderer, and for this his life is taken from him. Unfortunately, we can’t close the book quite yet. You see, there are actually multiple versions of the story of Ixion. According to some, it wasn’t his father-in-law he killed, but rather his mother.
As before, by the standards of mythology, there’s nothing strange about this. Characters and details are easily confused over many retellings. This is fine, if you think of a myth merely as a vehicle to convey a core message (like “don’t sleep with the wife of the guy who throws thunder”). But Girard wishes us to view the myth as a retelling of a real, historical incident. At least, we should take the characters and their plights seriously.
Let’s try doing that for Ixion: view the story anew, through our modern sensibilities. Imagine that you are seated in a jury, and asked to hear Ixion’s case. Ixion, if found guilty, is to be put to death. (The more colorful aspects of the procedure are left out.) The crime is adultery.
Because the jury is likely to be unconvinced, the prosecutor brings forth character witnesses. Ixion, the first says, really is a terrible man. He killed his father-in-law. He slayed his own kin! You should have no compunctions about sentencing him to spin on a flaming wheel for eternity. The second character witness agrees. It was, of course, his mother he killed, not his father-in-law. Nevertheless, we can all agree Ixion is bad.
What does this look like? Not in the context of Greek mythology, but to our modern eyes? It’s fairly clear: the prosecutor and witnesses are casting about for any crime to pin on Ixion. It doesn’t matter what the crime is so long as it’s heinous. Details don’t matter, facts don’t matter: Ixion must be convicted.
Girard’s favored example is neither Prometheus nor Ixion, but rather Oedipus. Oedipus, as an infant, is abandoned by his parents, who have heard a prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother. This abandonment is Oedipus’s first expulsion from society. Oedipus grows up never knowing who his parents are. In due course, he does indeed kill his father and marry his mother—of course, this must be done unknowingly. When his crime is discovered, he is again expelled (and famously, so overcome with grief that he tears out his own eyes).
Girard focuses on the expulsions. Were they deserved? Within the framework of the myth, yes. Oedipus did, in fact, kill his father and marry his mother, just as the prophecy predicted. His parents were therefore justified in abandoning him the first time, and of course after the crimes were committed, society at large was justified in exiling him. But faithfully apply modern sensibilities, and the result is very different: the infant Oedipus had committed no crime, nor did the adult, at least knowingly. Oedipus, through this lens, is not a story of patricide and incest—it’s a story of unjust persecution.
The legend of Prometheus is about the origin of fire. The story of Ixion is about the dangers of immoral behavior, particularly when the most powerful guy around is your victim. Oedipus is a tale of family, honor, and fate. But underneath these superficial themes lie striking commonalities: a questionable accusation, an extreme form of justice, and millenia of retellings in which the guilt of the accused is never questioned. The myths are not about this miscarriage of justice—instead, they encourage the listener to become a participant.
One myth, in particular, stands apart: the crucifixion. Structurally, of course, it’s very similar. A man of questionable guilt and ambiguous crimes is put to death by (or, really, at the behest of) a large mob. But that structural similarity makes the differences in the telling of the myth crucial. When we recount the story of Oedipus, or the crimes of Ixion, we nearly always “take the side” of the mob, usually without even realizing we’re doing so. It is taken for granted that the punishment dealt out was just. The story of Christ’s death is told from just the opposite perspective: a clearly innocent man, put to death because a mob demanded it.
This is the central point of Girard’s I See Satan Fall Like Lightning: that Christianity stands apart from mythology in telling a story from the perspective of the victim.
Girard is most famous for writing not about mythology, but about mimesis. He begins by observing the obvious: people tend to copy each other. Of course this takes many forms, but particularly desire has a mimetic property. This is nothing deep or surprising. If one kid picks up a toy, suddenly it looks just a little bit shinier to everybody else. The thing you want most is, often, the thing that’s difficult to have—and it’s quite difficult to have something if you need to compete with a peer to get it!
The difficulty with mimetic desire specifically is that it naturally leads to violence. It’s easy enough to see how this can come about. Bill has a car, Bob is envious, Bob kills Bill and takes the car.
Most desire isn’t strong enough to incite murder. Unfortunately, mimetic desire also has a tendency to get stronger over time, of its own accord. Here I must confess some frustration with Girard, who has a habit of writing in very general terms with few concrete examples. In this case, I have trouble pinning down exactly what the mechanism is supposed to be for mimetic desire to grow stronger.
Fortunately, a little thought furnishes many plausible mechanisms; here’s one. For Bob to want a nicer car, it’s not actually necessary to see Bill’s car—it may be sufficient just to observe that Bill also desires a nicer car. The more Bill wants a car, the stronger this effect grows; Bill’s desire is directly contagious. And since Bob now wants a car (having caught the desire from Bill), that causes Bill to want the car even more! Thus the two enter a sort of mimetic spiral, each envious in imitation of their rival.
Of course, Bill and Bob can’t have everything that they both want. Inevitably, desiring the same things, they will become competitors, and obstruct each other in their goals. This process Girard refers to as scandal: the one is blocked from his desires by the other. Scandals naturally occur throughout society, creating a war of all against all which gradually builds until violence must erupt.
Importantly, the scandal is not caused by the creation of divisions within society, but rather by unity. As time goes on, Bill and Bob become more alike each other, desiring the same things. This is what causes the scandal to begin with! It is the strong similarity to each other that forces them to become rivals. In Girard’s language, the two become doubles. They are rivals in proportion to their commonalities:
Envy, jealousy, and hate render alike those they possess, but in our world people tend to misunderstand or ignore the resemblances and identities that these passions generate. They have ears only for the deceptive celebration of differences, which rages more than ever in our societies, not because real differences are increasing but because they are disappearing.
(All quotes in this article are from René Girard unless explicitly noted otherwise.)
Inevitably, this talk of mimesis and imitation has strong The Secret of our Success vibes. There, though, imitation is certainly a good thing, allowing humans to accomplish collectively what could never be done individually. Girard, thankfully, does not want us to discard mimesis altogether:
Even if the mimetic nature of human desire is responsible for most of the violent acts that distress us, we should not conclude that mimetic desire is bad in itself. If our desires were not mimetic, they would be forever fixed on predetermined objects; they would be a particular form of instinct. Human beings could no more change their desire than cows their appetite for grass. Without mimetic desire there would be neither freedom nor humanity. Mimetic desire is intrinsically good.
Unfortunately Girard is a little vague on precisely what separates “good” mimesis from the “bad”:
In short, there are good rivalries, and there are bad ones. There is the healthy emulation of those who “rival one another only in efficiency, each one doing his duty.” There are the unhealthy rivalries of those who “do not master themselves”. [...] It’s not external enemies that ruin societies; it’s the unlimited ambitions, the unbridled competitions, that divide human beings rather than unite them.
What, exactly, does it mean to “limit” and “bridle” mimetic imitation? Is it a sufficient limitation if I only kill the mother and father in jealous rage, while sparing the son? Or, at the other extreme, am I required to confine myself to quietly rolling my eyes whenever they leave on vacation?
I think what Girard means is that emulation should be directed towards productive ends. Alas, this is not a helpful insight. We can all agree that being a productive member of society is good, and being a lousy leech is bad, whether or not imitation is involved. For any behavior, one can do too much or too little. Simply saying that “too much is bad” is no guide to how much is bad.
Perhaps it is sufficient to simply be aware of the problem. We can hope—and indeed, Girard eventually suggests—that the knowledge that one is participating in a mimetic rivalry can put a stopper on the most harmful effects.
So far we have discussed the cruelty of myths, and the consequences of mimetic desire. Now we will see, in one story, how they are connected.
In the city of Ephesus, Philostratus writes, there was a plague. After many attempts to rid themselves of it, the Ephesians turned to one Apollonius, who was successful. Girard relates Philostratus’s telling of the event, and like him I can do no better than to quote:
“Take courage, for I will today put a stop to the course of the disease.” And with these words he led the population entire to the theatre, where the image of the Averting god has been set up. And there he saw what seemed an old mendicant artfully blinking his eyes as if blind, and he carried a wallet and a crust of bread in it; and he was clad in rags and was very squalid of countenance. Apollonius therefore ranged the Epheseians around him and said: “Pick up as many stones as you can and hurl them at this enemy of the gods.” Now the Ephesians wondered what he meant, and were shocked at the idea of murdering a stranger so manifestly miserable; for he was begging and praying them to take mercy upon him. Nevertheless Apollonius insisted and egged on the Ephesians to launch themselves on him and not let him go. And as soon as some of them began to take shots and hit him with their stones, the beggar who had seemed to blink and be blind, gave them all a sudden glance and showed that his eyes were full of fire. Then the Ephesians recognized that he was a demon, and they stoned him so thoroughly that their stones were heaped into a great cairn around him. After a little pause Apollonius bade them remove the stones and acquaint themselves with the wild animal which they had slain. When therefore they had exposed the object which they thought they had thrown their missiles at, they found that he had disappeared and instead of him there was a hound who resembled in form and look a Molosian dog, but was in size the equal of the largest lion; there he lay before their eyes, pounded to pulp by their stones and vomiting foam as mad dogs do. Accordingly the statue of the Averting god, namely Hercules, has been set up over the spot where the ghost was slain.
This story has, in many ways, the flavor of myth: a man transformed to a demon, the influence of a god, and a plague cured miraculously. But it certainly refers to a historical event, and so we must try to understand how it came to be that we are hearing this story. Some events happened, not necessarily those that were related. Those events were recounted, and the story retold, and eventually written down by Philostratus. What could the events have been that led to this story? And remember: no miracles allowed!
There was, let’s assume, a plague. Enter Apollonius, a confident huckster. According to the story, he encounters an apparent beggar and recognizes him as a plague demon of some form. Since plague demons don’t exist, though, we’d better come up with a different interpretation! Girard suggests the obvious: this really was just an old beggar, who Apollonius recognized as an excellent scapegoat.
Apollonius urges the Ephesians to stone the beggar, and they are (to their almost-literally eternal credit) reluctant. But once the first stone is thrown, something changes. The Ephesians recognize the demon, and now their hearts are in it, and the beggar is killed. But again: demons don’t exist, so how can it be that they recognized a demon?
First, ignore the reference to the demon. Stripped of supernatural mumbo-jumbo, the story now says something like:
At first the people were unwilling to throw stones, but once the first person stepped forward to attack, it rather suddenly became easier.
That’s believable enough! Girard puts a bit of a mimetic spin on it, suggesting that whoever the first stone-caster was, their desire (to stone the beggar) was contagious. In fact, not just their desire should be contagious, but their interpretation of the world. To the first stone-thrower, the beggar really was evil, and soon enough the entire population has copied that interpretation, and they see the beggar for what he “really” is: a demon. History is told by those who aren’t being stoned to death, so of course in the story passed down to us, that’s exactly what happened.
Finally we must ask: how can it be that stoning an innocent man restores health to the community? The most likely explanation is a literal co-incidence. Here, though, GIrard has a striking suggestion:
In the ancient and medieval world the word “plague” was often used in a sense that is not strictly medical. Almost always it included a social dimension. Until the Renaissance, wherever “real” epidemics occurred, they disrupted social relations. Wherever social relations were disrupted, epidemics could occur. The fact that both kinds of plague are contagious facilitates the confusion.
The word “audacious” comes to mind. Girard probably benefits from his habitual vagueness: were he any more concrete, we might be able to pin down a specific factual claim and disprove it. The general suggestion is that ancient and medieval communities, unaware of basic medical facts, were likely to have trouble distinguishing between medical and social ills. This is a tempting claim, not least because it ties up Apollonius’s miracle in a neat little bundle:
[The plague of Ephesus] is an epidemic of mimetic rivalries, an interweaving of scandals, a war of all against all, which, thanks to the victim selected by the diabolical cleverness of Apollonius, is transformed “miraculously” into a reconciliation of all against one. [...] He expects from this violence a cathartic effect superior to that of ordinary sacrifices or of the tragic dramas that were performed, no doubt, in the theater of Ephesus in the second century of our era.
I’m genuinely torn on what to do with this idea. The linguistic parallels between mimesis and plague run deep. Some of these (“going viral”) are clearly because the people who, in the last century, have thought carefully about imitation and mimetics, tended to use disease as a convenient metaphor. Others have older origins: we speak of “social ills” being “cured”, and that sounds a lot like what Apollonius accomplished! But these are all merely linguistic parallels, and might mean nothing.
On the other hand, the ancient Greeks had a form of ritual sacrifice—human ritual sacrifice, to be clear, so there’s much in common with scapegoating—termed Pharmakos. That sounds a lot like “pharmacology”, and this is not a coincidence. Not because nothing is ever a coincidence, but because it’s really just not a coincidence: the ritual was meant to cleanse the city of various ills.
The pharmakos rituals were supposed to purify the Greek cities of their illnesses and render them more harmonious; they were supposed, in short, to accomplish the kind of miracle that Apollonius worked with his beggar.
This sounds a lot like confusing medical and social plagues!
If we accept Girard’s view of the plague as at least partially social (i.e. a mimetic plague), rather than medical, we’re left with the following historical story. Ephesus was a society scandalized, in a war of all against all. Apollonius came along, and found a scapegoat—an innocent man to blame for society’s ills. In convincing the population to blame this man, he also gave them all a common enemy. They were, in the moment of the stoning, a truly united body, in a war of all against one. Once the beggar was dead, there was (at least for a brief time) no conflict remaining. The social plague was cured.
And how is the story told? Like the legend of Prometheus, it must be told so that the beggar was at fault. That’s the whole point: for the scapegoating trick to work, society must be unanimous: there is nobody remaining to tell the story as we now suspect it, in which an innocent man is murdered. This, for Girard, is the likely origin of many myths:
As the gods age, of course, their evil dimension becomes blurred to the advantage of their beneficent side, but vestiges of the original demon always remain, that is, of the victim who was collectively massacred. If we are content to repeat the standard cliches about the Olympian gods, we will see only their majesty and their serenity. In classical art the positive elements are generally in the foreground, but behind them, even in the case of Zeus, there are the “wild pranks” of the god, as they are called with an indulgence that is a little silly. Everyone agrees to “excuse these escapades with a knowingly complicit smile, as if it were a little like youth who “sow their wild oats” or like an American president caught in a flagrant act of adultery. [...]
In reality the “wild pranks” are the traces of crimes similar to those of Oedipus and other divinized scapegoats: parricide, incest, bestial fornication, and other horrible crimes. All of these are accusations typical of witch-hunts, with which primitive mobs are permanently obsessed, as are modern crowds seeking to find victims.
Crucially, the telling of these myths does not come after the process Girard describes. It’s not “first there’s societal conflict, then an innocent is blamed, then peace is restored, and that’s where these stories come from”. Rather, telling the stories is actually part of the lynching. We repeat the allegations, we recount the punishment, and we ignore the fact that the allegation is clearly nonsensical and the punishment clearly unjust. Look again at the tale of Ixion. The two accusations of murder levelled against him—that’s the sort of thing that happens when people are casting around, after the deed has been done, for something to justify Ixion’s assassination.
This is the mythological heritage of mankind: a longstanding tradition of lynching the innocent and lying to ourselves about it—for millenia.
Wikipedia labels Girard a “historian, polymath, literary critic, and philosopher of social science”. In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard is first and foremost a Christian apologist. The book is unambiguously dedicated to the theme that the monotheistic religions are decisively different from, and better than, all previous mythology and religion. To Girard, Judaism began the work of viewing persecution from the eyes of the victim, and Christianity completed the task by giving the world an instance of persecution in which the innocence of the victim could not be denied. (No mention is made of Islam!)
Girard has choice words for those who view various religions as largely interchangeable:
Those who discuss religions give the impression of taking them very seriously, but in reality they don’t attach the least importance to them. They view religions, all the religions, as completely mythical, but each in its own fashion. They praise them all in the same spirit we all praise kindergartners’ “paintings,” which are all masterpieces.
So let’s try and attach some importance to religion, as Girard does, beginning with the Old Testament. The tale of Joseph is an easy one. When Joseph was a slave, his owner’s wife attempted to seduce him and was spurned. Offended, the wife claimed that Joseph attempted to rape her, and Joseph is thus wrongfully imprisoned. This isn’t what “actually happened”, this is what the Bible tells us! A mythic source, recounting a false accusation as a false accusation—a true miracle.
“Ah,” the clever reader will say, “but perhaps Joseph was an attempted rapist, and the Bible is credulously repeating Joseph’s own false accusation about his owner’s wife.” Perhaps. And our modern sensibilities certainly make it difficult to sympathize with the wife of the guy who owns a human being, so it would be easy for us to continue repeating Joseph’s false accusation. But crucially, the Old Testament recounts no retribution against the owner or his wife. The tale of Joseph is not one of revenge nor one of justice. It is simply the tale of a victim. True or false, it’s noteworthy and unusual.
If you want a tale of an innocent victim in the Old Testament, the canonical example is probably Job. Job is punished by Satan (as part of a bet with God) precisely because he’s innocent: Satan is annoyed and wants to prove that he isn’t perfect. Job’s friends then come and join in the persecution, prodding Job and insisting he must have somehow sinned. Job remains true, protesting his innocence while praising God.
Girard just wouldn’t be Girard without making an unnecessarily strong claim:
The psalms [...] may be the oldest texts in human history to let the voice of the victims, rather than that of their persecutors, be heard.
The point, though, is well taken. The Old Testament foregrounds the voices of victims in a way that, say, Greek mythology really doesn’t. In both the Old Testament and in mythology, there is plenty of unjust persecution to be found. But when we tell the tales of Greek mythology, we tell them from the perspective of the angry mob and the vindictive king. The Old Testament sides firmly with the victim.
The New Testament takes this all a step further. The Old Testament contains stories of persecution told from the perspective of the victim, yes, but that aspect is arguably not central to what the Old Testament is. The New Testament, though, really is about unjust persecution of an unambiguously innocent man. It’s the story that forces you to recognize lynchings for what they are. Jesus is killed at the behest of a mob—Pontius Pilate accedes in the (apparently correct) belief that allowing this one scapegoat will restore social order to the realm. But finally, we have the story told in the modern framing: this event is not justice, but a travesty.
Girard goes into a lot of detail while extolling the virtues of the New Testament, and does a good job of it. One particular point is really worth repeating here. In the story of Apollonius above, remember that it was difficult for Apollonius to get the mob to start throwing stones. Once the process is started, it’s sustained and accelerated by imitation/mimetic desire, but the very beginning can be tricky. The transformation from all-against-all to all-against-one can happen organically—after all, everybody is already in the habit of copying their mimetic double, so it’s easy for hatred of a single individual to spread quickly—but in the case Apollonius faced, he needed to ensure it was directed against a particular, defenseless, person with no allies that might obstruct the process. To do this, he had to get someone to cast the first stone. Jesus, in a similar situation, channels his own effort into preventing that first stone from being cast, trying to impress upon his audience the significance of that incendiary act.
A special irony here is not lost on Girard. The Old Testament is infamous for having, well, “Old Testament morality”. It’s the cruel book, it’s the book of smiting and burning and sacrifice, it’s the book of outlandish punishments for trivial crimes. The New Testament, meanwhile, is often accused of implying that the blame for Jesus’s death lies on a particular scapegoat population. But while being popularly ridiculed for those faults, its rather more virtuous treatment of the innocent is ignored:
Many intellectuals, when they turn to the Bible of the New Testament claim to smell there (with a disgust borrowed of course from Nietzsche) what they call “des relents du bouc emissaire” (“the odor of the scapegoat”). They find this smell “nauseating,” and I suppose this is in memory of the original he-goat. These fine bloodhounds never exercise this exquisite acuteness of their sense of smell when they turn to Dionysos and Oedipus. No one ever detects in the myths the stench of corpses badly buried. The myths are never the objects of the least suspicion.
This is late in the book, and Girard is starting to get grumpy. Remember, he’s a serious Christian in academia—not the easiest way to make friends. Moreover, he’s writing in 2001, and Twitter wasn’t available yet as a place to dump this stuff. Let’s forgive him his spicy takes and move on to understand what all this means for Christianity’s role in the modern world.
One cannot write an entire book about mimetics and Christianity without recognizing that Christianity is the greatest meme ever told. About a third of the world are Christian believers; Islam, a mimetic descendent, gives another quarter. To Girard—writing, remember, from the perspective of a believing Christian—that’s the whole point. Girard identifies Satan with mimetic violence itself. Satan is the “tempter”, Satan is the “accuser”. Satan must be defeated; how can this be done? By spreading, far and wide, a meme that explains how mimetic violence and the scapegoat mechanism work.
Before I go further: Girard believes quite firmly that concern for victims is a phenomenon that began in Judaism and Christianity, and is exclusive to that tradition. No other mythology, religion, or society can have independently adopted the same perspective. Once again, this seems an implausibly strong claim, but also an unnecessarily strong one. It is sufficient, to understand what he says on the topic of the modern concern for victims, to believe that this perspective arose rarely, and that its most widespread proponent today is Christianity.
Girard tries to explain how “Christianity” (by which he really means our modern victim-oriented sensibility, whatever its religious trappings) spread so successfully and ends up resorting, at least in part, to divine intervention. Leaving that question aside, we’re left with the empirical claim:
Our society is the most preoccupied with victims of any that ever was. Even if it is insincere, a big show, the phenomenon has no precedent. No historical period, no society we know, has ever spoken of victims as we do. We can detect in the recent past the beginnings of the contemporary attitude, but every day new records are broken. We are all actors as well as witnesses in a great anthropological first.
I’m sorely tempted to invoke the precautionary principle, and suggest that we bring back the practice of scapegoating in order to avoid potentially severe negative consequences from this “great anthropological first”. Alas, if we take the story above seriously, this isn’t practical: the New Testament doesn’t forbid scapegoating, it rather makes it less powerful by making the participants aware of the mechanism in which they take part. We would have to trick people, to prevent them from realizing they were taking part in a scapegoating to begin with.
One question prickles: if Christianity—the concern for victims—is a powerful meme, should we be concerned that it will become another engine for breeding dangerous rivalries that can only be concluded through scapegoating? Girard says yes:
The concern for victims has become a paradoxical competition of mimetic rivalries, of opponents continually trying to outbid one another.
“Looks like scapegoating’s back on the menu, boys!”
At this point Girard becomes eminently quotable, and I really have very little to add. Most of the quotes below are taken from Chapter 13, “The Modern Concern for Victims”. I remind you that he’s writing in 2001, and died in 2015.
Concern for victims makes us all acutely sensitive to when another is being cast as a scapegoat. How should one act to defend the powerless? And how do people tend to act, in practice?
We could use our insight discreetly with our neighbors, not humiliating those we catch in the very act of expelling a scapegoat. But more frequently we turn our knowledge into a weapon, a means not only of perpetuating old conflicts but of raising them to a new level of cunning, which the very existence of this knowledge and its propagation in the whole society demand. [...] Our society’s obligatory compassion authorizes new forms of cruelty.
And of course some victims are more equal than others:
The victims most interesting to us are always those who allow us to condemn our neighbors. And our neighbors do the same. They always think first about victims for whom they hold us responsible.
In case it’s not clear, Girard is not happy about this aspect of the modern world:
The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition.
There is something deeply dishonest about using—or at least participating in—the scapegoat mechanism while claiming to be chiefly concerned with the plight of victims.
This other totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves.
In the symbolic language of the New Testament, we would say that in our world Satan, trying to make a new start and gain new triumphs, borrows the language of victims. Satan imitates Christ better and better and pretends to surpass him.
All that having been said, nobody can deny that René Girard was truly awake to our collective moral culpability for scapegoating. At the close of the book he writes:
Because of the simple fact that we live in a world whose structure is based on mimetic processes and victim mechanisms, from which we all profit without knowing it, we are all accessories to the Crucifixion, persecutors of Christ.
Which is just about the most Christian sentiment I can think of.
