In sixth-century BC Colophon, on the coast of Asia Minor, a city performed the following ritual. Once a year, an especially ugly man was selected from the community. He was honored with a feast of figs, barley soup, and cheese. Then he was led through the streets and whipped with fig branches - seven times on his phallus - before being driven beyond the city walls. Some sources say he was stoned; later accounts say he was burned and his ashes scattered in the sea. In Athens, the practice was doubled: a man and a woman, both chosen for their ugliness, were feasted, paraded through the town, beaten with green twigs, and expelled or killed at the annual Thargelia festival. The Greeks called this person the pharmakos — a word that shares its root with pharmakon, which means both cure and poison.
Two thousand years later and an ocean away, the Mexica did something stranger still. In Tenochtitlan, for the festival of Toxcatl, they selected not an ugly body but a perfect one: a captive warrior without blemish, chosen to become the ixiptla of Tezcatlipoca. For a year he moved through the city dressed in splendor, playing the flute, carrying flowers, treated as a lord. Then, at the climax of the festival, he ascended the steps of the great temple, breaking a flute on each step, and at the top priests cut out his heart with an obsidian blade. His heart was offered to the sun, his head was placed on the public rack, and the next year’s ixiptla was given his skin to wear as a cloak. The victim was not merely given to the god. He was made into the god, adored as the god, and then killed.
The word ixiptla does not translate as "impersonator" or "representative", but denotes something closer to ontological identity. He did not symbolize the god. He was the god, for exactly one year, until the god required a new body.
In the hill country of eastern India, the Khond people practiced something that fused the logic of both. Nineteenth-century accounts describe the Meriah as future victims who were purchased, often as children kidnapped from the plains, and raised within Khond villages with extraordinary privilege. They were given land and farming stock. They were permitted to marry and have children. If a Meriah youth desired the wife or daughter of a Khond man, the family would comply, considering it a special favor. Consecrated to the Earth goddess, the Meriah was, in every respect, an honored member of the community. Until the annual sacrifice, when the Meriah was torn apart by the collective. Each family in the village received a shred of flesh, which they buried in their fields to ensure the fertility of the earth. The victim's body became the substance from which the community fed.
Three civilizations, three continents, all converging independently on the same cultural evolution. And they are but three examples of practices that have emerged time and time again, in a sort of sacred carcinization.
Why?
The first thing you notice about René Girard is the ambition.
He wasn’t exactly shy about it. Just look at the name of his magnum opus, the excellently-titled Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. In an age where Theories of Everything are treated with intense skepticism, where science and knowledge move forward one cautious footnote at a time, it’s almost refreshing to read someone bold enough to attempt to solve half the big questions in one go.
The second thing you notice about Girard is that he is an ass.
He can be forgiven for his incessant use of the royal “we”, a common styling that you’ll find throughout this very essay. Nevertheless, it begins to grate when “we” really means “everyone but me”:
“All too often we go astray when examining the nature of the festival and allow our attention to be diverted to secondary aspects... We fail to grasp that they share a common origin…”
Seemingly everyone, everywhere is either “failing to grasp” or “refusing to acknowledge” the truth of his theories; variations of both sentiments appear dozens of times. He has an incredible stamina for dwelling on the errors and oversights of his predecessors and contemporaries, a preoccupation which takes up what feels like a full third of Violence and the Sacred. When he does deign to offer praise, Girard doles it out in exact proportion to how closely the individual in question aligns with his personal views. One gathers that this metric is perfectly sufficient for assessing artistic and intellectual merit.
Which, incidentally, is the entire premise of his first major work, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. The book is built around ranking novelists by how closely they approximate what would become mimetic theory. Proust, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes, and Stendhal are "novelistic" geniuses who reveal mimetic desire. Everyone else is a "romantic" liar who conceals it.
Given the origin of Girard’s theories in this comparative analysis of great works of literature, it is perhaps unsurprising that Violence and the Sacred is equal parts obsessed with denigrating modern science and legitimizing his methodology as a form of the scientific method.
The overall effect is to engender an irresistible urge in the reader to shoot spitballs at the back of his head.
And yet. Foibles aside, it is undeniable that Girard developed some Big Ideas. Two, specifically. The first is his mimetic theory of desire, which has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years and is likely familiar territory for many readers. The second idea, which is the principal subject of Violence and the Sacred, is related but distinct; the scapegoat, which Girard posits as both the founding and foundering mechanism of civilization.
This review is organized into three sections.
In Part One, we will examine Girard’s two Big Ideas and the core thesis of Violence and the Sacred. After establishing the basics of the mimetic theory of desire, we will look at how mimesis can create a crisis for groups that lack a means to regulate it. Next, we will connect this to the sacred via the scapegoat mechanism, which Girard theorized as the regulatory means that early societies developed as a result of such crises.
While Girard often alludes to other thinkers in passing, he typically fails to engage with conflicting or complicating theories of the sacred in any sort of rigorous fashion. Part Two attempts to fix this oversight by assembling a variety of other important theories on the sacred into a broad synthesis. Then we will assess where Girard’s theories fit into the overall picture.
In Part Three, we move from origins to implications. Much of Girard’s work after Violence and the Sacred focused on the impact of the decline of the sacred in modern times. After exploring his views on the subject, we shall consider an alternative theory on the way that the sacred functions in a secular context.
Part One
The Mimetic Theory of Desire
Mimetic theory is deceptively simple, consisting of three common-sense components: the desirer, the object of desire, and the model/rival.
As young children, we learn everything we know by emulating our elders. This teaches us not only how to behave, but what to want; by seeing that something is desirable to our models, we learn that we should desire it for ourselves:
"The subject desires the object because the rival desires it. In desiring an object the rival alerts the subject to the desirability of the object. The rival, then, serves as a model for the subject, not only in regard to such secondary matters as style and opinions but also, and more essentially, in regard to desires."
Initially, this is little more than “monkey see, monkey do”. Girard distinguishes such superficial mimicry from mimesis by the capacity to model the model, rather than the behavior.[1] Rather than imitating the model in order to gain the desired object (mimicry), the end goal of mimesis is to become the model:
"Once his basic needs are satisfied (indeed, sometimes even before), man is subject to intense desires, though he may not know precisely for what. The reason is that he desires being, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems to possess."
The problem with modeling yourself after someone is that there inevitably comes a point where this generates conflict. If you both want the same thing, and only one person can have it, then something has got to give. Girard calls this the mimetic double bind:
"Man cannot respond to that universal human injunction, 'Imitate me!' without almost immediately encountering an inexplicable counterorder: 'Don't imitate me!' (which really means, 'Do not appropriate my object')."
As the great poet said, “that’s around the time / Your idols become your rivals.”
Mimetic theory’s connection to the sacred and questions of fundamental anthropology is less than obvious, but it makes a great deal of sense when one imagines that Girard developed his theories in the first place.
Mimetic theory originated in the common threads of the great novels, and from there it was only natural to apply the same lines of analysis to even older texts. Much of Violence in the Sacred dwells on the Greek tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. The plays repeatedly emphasize the symmetry of the protagonists/antagonists, locked in a mimetic rivalry where the conflict increases in proportion to their similarity. Eventually Girard concluded, as a general principle, that a loss of differentiation inevitably leads to conflict.
This is an easily observable dynamic; Freud and Jung, Shaq and Kobe, every single teenager who has ever existed. Freud himself famously called it the narcissism of minor differences. Pierre Bourdieu found it in relation to taste:
“Social identity lies in difference, and difference is asserted against what is closest, which represents the greatest threat.”
This principle operates at the group level as well. From Tocqueville to Turchin, we find that relative deprivation (one’s perceived lack relative to where one ought to be, as judged by comparison to one’s peers and near-betters) can be just as important as absolute deprivation in determining individual life-satisfaction and overall societal stability.
A lack of differentiation necessitates strategies for increasing it in order to decrease conflict. In the animal world, resource partitioning and character displacement emerge when competition for the same resources gets too intense. In human society, something similar happens at the interpersonal level, as Venkatesh Rao describes in his series on the Gervais Principle:
“I began this post with an homage to Garrison Keilor’s Lake Wobegon, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” Keilor’s classic nugget of mordant wit has since been used to bolster the theory of illusory superiority, a kind of delusion by which the mediocre convince themselves they are above average.”
Nobody wants to think of themselves as average, much less below-average. Stable groups solve this problem by reinforcing differentiated identities for each member of the group, such that every individual can feel comfortably above average in their own way:
“At the life-script level, the game-playing social contract creates complete nominal illegibility. Each individual in a group is judged according to a custom life script that makes it impossible to compare two lives within the group.”
In other words, everyone gets a role. The handsome one, the successful one, the athletic one, the funny one… everybody gets defined by what they are above-average at within the group context, and this allows everyone to have a niche that reifies an above-average identity. This works fantastically, unless two or more people start competing for the same spot in the group.
Such tactics work in the modern world, where conflict is low level and contained. But the ancient world had far less tools at their disposal for mediating and mitigating the potential for escalation. The earliest societies had few such tools at all. They had to be invented, which is where we return to Girard.
Sameness and Difference in Early Societies
The Greek tragedies were based on the Greek myths, thereby marking the transition point of Girard’s analysis from literature to anthropology. And a seamless transition it is, because early cultural and religious practices around the globe have a striking fixation on sameness and difference.
Let’s start with the obvious:
“In some primitive societies twins inspire a particular terror. It is not unusual for one of the twins, and often both, to be put to death. The origin of this terror has long puzzled ethnologists…
…Twins invariably share a cultural identity, and they often have a striking physical resemblance to each other. Wherever differences are lacking, violence threatens. Between the biological twins and the sociological twins there arises a confusion that grows more troubled as the question of differences reaches a crisis… When faced with biological twins the normal reaction of the culture is simply to avoid contagion. The way primitive societies attempt to accomplish this offers a graphic demonstration of the kind of danger they associate with twins. In societies where their very existence is considered dangerous, the infants are ‘exposed’; that is, abandoned outside the community under conditions that make their death inevitable. Any act of direct physical violence against the anathema is scrupulously avoided.”
Girard repeatedly highlights that early societies viewed a lack of differentiation as a societal threat - one that they tended to resolve through indirect means, rather than direct violence against the perceived source. Why? Because violence is a form of contagion:
“The Nyakyusa maintain that the parents of twins are contaminated by ‘bad’ violence, and there is a certain logic about that notion, since the parents are, after all, responsible for engendering the twins. In reference to the twins the parents are designated by a term that is applied to all threatening individuals, all monstrous or terrifying creatures. In order to prevent the spread of pollution the parents are required to isolate themselves and submit to rites of purification; only then are they allowed to rejoin the community. It is not unreasonable to believe that the relatives and close friends of the twins' parents, as well as their immediate neighbors, are those most directly exposed to the infection.
'Bad’ violence is by definition force that works on various levels—physical, familial, social—and spreads from one to the other. Twins are impure in the same way that a warrior steeped in carnage is impure, or an incestuous couple, or a menstruating woman. All forms of violence lead back to violence. We overlook this fact because the primitive concept of a link between the loss of distinctions and violence is strange to us; but we need only consider the calamities primitive people associate with twins to perceive the logic of this concept.”
Girard marshals dozens of examples to support these two patterns: the fear of similarity as a societal threat, and the fear of violence as a social contagion.
Twins are merely the most clear-cut case of similarity. The twins material shades naturally into the enemy-brothers motif, which is arguably the single most common structure in founding mythology worldwide:
“We instinctively tend to regard the fraternal relationship as an affectionate one; yet the mythological, historical, and literary examples that spring to mind tell a different story: Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Eteocles and Polyneices, Romulus and Remus, Richard the LionHearted and John Lackland.”
Some of Girard’s most compelling examples showcase the ways that primitive societies appear to have engineered solutions to the issue. Avunculocal societies placed special importance on the uncle, often with strict rules governing the relations between various members of the family. Trobriand society took this to a revealing extreme, documented in Malinowski’s The Father in Primitive Psychology:
“In a matrilineal society, as in the Trobriands, where all maternal relatives are considered to be of the ‘same body,’ and the father to be a ‘stranger,’ we would naturally expect and have no doubt that the facial and bodily similarity would be traced to the mother's family alone. The contrary is the case, and this is affirmed with an extremely strong social emphasis. Not only is it a household dogma, so to speak, that a child never resembles its mother, any of its brothers or sisters, or any of its maternal kinsmen, but it is extremely bad form and a great offence to hint at any such similarity.”
Interestingly, Girard notes that while the father’s role as a parent (i.e., model) is denied in favor of the uncle, his children’s resemblance to him is emphasized:
“On the other hand, the Trobriands not only tolerate references to the resemblance between fathers and children but virtually demand its acknowledgment. This society formally denies the father's role in the reproductive process; between father and children, then, no parental link is said to exist.
Malinowski's description demonstrates that a paternal resemblance is perceived by the Trobriands, paradoxically enough, in terms of differences. It is the father who serves to differentiate the children from one another.”
Thus the father is said to mold the face of the child, which is what - crucially - makes them different from their mother and from each other. This creates a dynamic that completely baffles Malinowski:
"It was often pointed out to me how strongly one or the other of the sons of To'uluwa, chief of Omarakana, resembled his father... Whenever I pointed out that this similarity to the father implied similarity among each other, such a heresy was indignantly repudiated."
Girard has no such confusion:
“Negation here serves as affirmation. There would be nothing untoward in mentioning resemblances if they were not a matter of great importance. To accuse two close relatives of resembling one another is to assert that they are a menace to the community, the carriers of an infectious disease.”
The Trobrianders are merely the most explicit example of patterns that developed independently across the globe. In every corner of the world, we see practices intended to define the relationships between family members in ways that decrease similarity and promote differentiation.
In a number of East African pastoral societies (the Maasai, various Nilotic groups), formalized avoidance rules govern the relationship between a father and his eldest son specifically - the son who is most structurally threatening because he's the most direct successor/replacement. They may not eat together, sit in the same area of the homestead, or be present at certain ceremonies simultaneously. The avoidance intensifies as the son reaches maturity, which is exactly when Girard's model predicts that the mimetic crisis becomes most acute.
Teknonymy, a widespread phenomenon in Southeast Asia, parts of Africa, and Oceania, involves the renaming of the parent after their child’s birth. The father stops being "his own name" and becomes "father of X”, so that the father's identity is redefined relationally to the child rather than as an independent subject. The two are thus linguistically locked into asymmetric positions.
There are almost too many relevant examples to list. Segmentary lineage societies (e.g., the Nuer and Dinka) often imposed mandatory fraternal separation at maturity. In Polynesia, royal brothers of the future king were frequently exiled, killed, or assigned to distant territories. And of course we are well familiar with primogeniture, another system intended to address the problem of succession and sibling rivalry.
Rules governing relationships rife with potential for mimetic rivalry appear in so many independent contexts that the necessity seems almost inarguable. Clearly, this was a Problem for early societies. But we have yet to establish why this potential for conflict between individuals should so frequently be characterized as a societal threat.
Violence as Contagion
Twice now, we have seen Girard refer to violence as a contagion, no different from an infectious disease. Primitive cultures everywhere concurred.
33 “‘Do not pollute the land where you are. Bloodshed pollutes the land, and atonement cannot be made for the land on which blood has been shed, except by the blood of the one who shed it. 34 Do not defile the land where you live and where I dwell, for I, the Lord, dwell among the Israelites.’”
- Numbers 35: 33-34
This is a repeated theme throughout the Bible. When Cain killed Abel, his brother’s blood cursed the ground itself. The Israelites suffered a famine during David’s reign, and when David prayed to the Lord he was told that “Saul and his family of murderers are the reason for this shortage, because he killed the Gibeonites.” God later told David that he was “not to build a house for my Name, because you are a warrior and have shed blood.” That task was left to his son Solomon, who was free from the taint of bloodshed.
Warriors in many cultures were considered impure for a time. Zulu warriors returning from battle underwent elaborate purification rituals before being permitted to re-enter the community. Various Native American groups (well-documented among the Navajo and the Pawnee) required warriors to be isolated and ritually cleansed, sometimes for days. The ancient Greeks recognized the concept of miasma - blood-pollution that clung to a killer and could contaminate anyone he contacted.
Girard observes that violence could infect not just people, but objects and places as well:
“In many religious communities—among the ancient Greeks, for instance—when a man has hanged himself, his body becomes impure. So too does the rope from which he dangles, the tree to which the rope is attached, and the field where the tree stands. The taint of impurity diminishes, however, as one draws away from the body. It is as if the scene of a violent act, and the objects with which the violence has been committed, send out emanations that penetrate everything in the immediate area, growing gradually weaker through time and space.”
Again, this was a widespread point of view. Among the Dinka, the fishing spear used in the ritual killing of the Master of the Fishing Spear had to be handled with extreme care afterward. In Japanese tradition, the concept of kegare (pollution/defilement) attached to objects and spaces associated with death and violence - a house where someone died, the tools used in butchering or execution, even the ground where blood was spilled.
Executioners were another category of untouchable around the world. In feudal Japan, the eta (now burakumin) who handled executions and corpse disposal were treated as a hereditary polluted class; the pollution was so powerful it transmitted across generations and through proximity. In India, the dom caste who manage cremation grounds occupy an analogous position. In medieval and early modern Europe, the executioner and his family were socially untouchable. They couldn't enter certain establishments, their children couldn't marry outside the profession, and they lived in designated areas.
Girard is adamant that these practices were an attempt to combat something real:
“While Frazer and his disciples tend to view this fear of infection by the ‘impure’ as a prime example of the ‘irrational’ and ‘superstitious’ element of religious thought, other observers regard it as an anticipation of sound scientific principles…
…The assimilation of contagious diseases and all forms of violence—the latter also regarded as contagious in nature—is based on a number of complementary inferences that combine to form a strikingly coherent picture.”
To steelman Girard a bit here, there is quite a bit of evidence to suggest that modern violence functions in precisely this fashion.
Copy-cat murders are a thing, of course. So are copy-cat suicides. The Werther effect, named after the purported wave of suicides that occured in the wake of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, describes how suicide can sometimes move in clusters. This suicidal contagion can occur through direct transmission or from highly publicized cases, a possibility which has led many journalistic codes to develop standards on the reporting of suicides. Some studies have shown that school-shootings, mass killings, and riots are contagious as well.
In the less immediate realm, children exposed to violence can become more violent themselves as adults. This can occur through imitation of aggressive models, intergenerational transmission of abuse, or even through mere exposure to community violence. For adults, studies on aggression-priming show that exposure to violence can lower the threshold for aggressive behavior in the short term, and displaced-aggression experiments have shown that provoked people often redirect aggression toward someone other than the original provocateur.
The most direct evidence for violence as contagion comes from epidemiological modeling. Studies have found that violence spreads through adolescents in a manner similar to infectious diseases.[2] Similarly, Andrew Papachristos's work at Yale tracked gunshot violence through social networks in Chicago and showed that it spreads through networks in a way that's statistically indistinguishable from a blood-borne pathogen. Gary Slutkin and the Cure Violence program in Chicago found that violence "epidemics" in Chicago neighborhoods could be modeled using standard epidemic curves, and that interrupting transmission chains (using "violence interrupters" who mediate conflicts before retaliation) reduced shootings by 41-73% in intervention zones. Both the modeling and the successful interventions were designed based on contagion assumptions, rather than deterrence or root-cause assumptions.
The Scapegoat Mechanism
All of this gives strong support to the idea that the primitive conception of violence as infectious was not rooted in superstition but in fact. If we accept this point of view and the practices derived from it as a form of proto-science, we must also adjust our priors accordingly. Early cultures consistently viewed a lack of differentiation as a threat to the entire society, and we must therefore give credence to the idea that this was indeed the case.
However, all of the practices we have discussed so far - the careful regulation of relationships with potential for mimetic rivalry, the segregation of violence and all that is associated with it from the rest of the community - are prophylactic in nature. What happens when the violence gets out of control?
Fission is one common response. When conflict reaches a certain level, the group splits off and forms another group. This is a well-documented occurrence in primitive societies, but it’s a solution that only works by keeping groups manageably small. Something else must emerge for societies to be able to handle conflict without fracturing into pieces.
Interpersonal conflict resolution works to an extent. Primates have all sorts of reconciliation mechanisms - grooming, food-sharing, third-party consolation - that humans developed even further. But once societies reach a sufficient level of complexity, interpersonal solutions no longer function. Exogamy leads to large kinship networks, and these coalitions can turn conflict that begins between two individuals into group conflicts between relative strangers who have nothing to do with the original dispute. This can easily become a familiar pattern seen throughout human history - the blood feud:
“Why does the spirit of revenge, wherever it breaks out, constitute such an intolerable menace? Perhaps because the only satisfactory revenge for spilt blood is spilling the blood of the killer; and in the blood feud there is no clear distinction between the act for which the killer is being punished and the punishment itself. Vengeance professes to be an act of reprisal, and every reprisal calls for another reprisal. The crime to which the act of vengeance addresses itself is almost never an unprecedented offense; in almost every case it has been committed in revenge for some prior crime.
Vengeance, then, is an interminable, infinitely repetitive process. Every time it turns up in some part of the community, it threatens to involve the whole social body. There is the risk that the act of vengeance will initiate a chain reaction whose consequences will quickly prove fatal to any society of modest size. The multiplication of reprisals instantaneously puts the very existence of a society in jeopardy, and that is why it is universally proscribed.”
Once begun, how can such a destructive cycle be brought to an end?
We have finally arrived at the grand theory of the scapegoat mechanism. For Girard, the practice of sacrifice begins as a ritualized reenactment of a real event that actually occurred: the convergence of the entire community on a single victim, who becomes the scapegoat for all of the troubles that preceded their death.
The story, to hear him tell it, goes something like this:
- Once the cycle of violence begins, it escalates unchecked, until the entire community becomes involved.
- At some point, the ire of the community becomes directed at a single victim. The victim may be an outsider, deformed, diseased, or otherwise different from the rest of the community in some distinguishing way that causes them to be singled out. The salient points are that the violence against the victim is unanimous, and the victim is not directly related to the cycle of vengeance in a way that provokes reprisal.
- The act of collective murder proves cathartic. All of a sudden, this community that was irreparably divided against itself experiences a unity that seems almost mystical in nature.
- Because the troubles of the community seem to vanish with the death of the victim, the victim is then retroactively blamed for the discord that preceded their death.
- The next time that violence engulfs the community, they naturally reach for the solution that worked the previous time. This eventually becomes ritualized as sacrifice.
If that feels like a just-so story, that’s because it is. Although the assembled narrative is speculative and unfalsifiable, the individual pieces have quite a bit of support.
The term scapegoat comes from Leviticus 16, which is quite clear about the purpose of the act:
21 And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness:
22 And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness.
The concept of substitution - what Girard refers to as the surrogate victim - appears in a wide variety of traditions, where the sacrificial victim is overtly meant to represent the community. In the case of animal sacrifice, many cultures chose animals that most closely resembled humans and emphasized their humanity:
“Joseph de Maistre discusses the choice of animal victims that display human characteristics—an attempt, as it were, to deceive the violent impulse: "The sacrificial animals were always those most prized for their usefulness: the gentlest, most innocent creatures, whose habits and instincts brought them most closely into harmony with man… From the animal realm were chosen as victims those who were, if we might use the phrase, the most human in nature."
Modern ethnology offers many examples of this sort of intuitive behavior. In some pastoral communities where sacrifice is practiced, the cattle are intimately associated with the daily life of the inhabitants. Two peoples of the Upper Nile, for example—the Nuers, observed by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, and the Dinka, studied at a somewhat later date by Godfrey Lienhardt—maintain a bovine society in their midst that parallels their own and is structured in the same fashion.”
Often, the concept of vengeance was explicitly invoked, as described here by Hubert and Mauss:
“For the act they were about to commit elaborate excuses were offered; they shuddered at the prospect of the sheep's death, they wept over it as though they were its parents. Before the blow was struck, they implored the beast's forgiveness. They then addressed themselves to the species to which the beast belonged, as if addressing a large family clan, beseeching it not to seek vengeance for the act that was about to be inflicted on one of its members. In the same vein the actual murderer was punished in some manner, either beaten or sent into exile.”
Where the victims are human, Girard’s insight into victim selection is particularly interesting. The types of victims chosen vary tremendously: foreigners, slaves, captives, criminals, children, the deformed, the unusually beautiful, the ritually polluted, or the socially isolated. The one unifying trait is that, in every tradition, no one will avenge the death of the chosen sacrifice:
“In a universe where the slightest dispute can lead to disaster—just as a slight cut can prove fatal to a hemophiliac—the rites of sacrifice serve to polarize the community's aggressive impulses and redirect them toward victims that may be actual or figurative, animate or inanimate, but that are always incapable of propagating further vengeance. The sacrificial process furnishes an outlet for those violent impulses that cannot be mastered by self-restraint; a partial outlet, to be sure, but always renewable, and one whose efficacy has been attested by an impressive number of reliable witnesses. The sacrificial process prevents the spread of violence by keeping vengeance in check.”
Comparative mythology also reveals a common through-line of collective murder. Across widely separated traditions, communities repeatedly imagine the beginning of human order as the aftermath of a killing. In the Hainuwele myth, the murdered girl’s dismembered body becomes the source of cultivated food. In the dema-deity complex more broadly, ancestral beings are slain by the first people, and from their bodies come crops, sexuality, mortality, ritual, and the conditions of ordinary human life. In the Purusha Sukta, the cosmic person is sacrificed and social order is literally divided out of his body. In Norse myth, the world itself is built from Ymir’s corpse. In Babylonian myth, Marduk founds cosmic order by killing Tiamat and fashioning the world from her body, while humanity is created from the blood of Quingu, the defeated rebel.
Girard marshals this heterogenous body of evidence in favor of a new definition of religion:
“Whether my theory proves to be true or false, it can, I believe, lay claim to being ‘scientific,’ if only because it allows for a rigorous definition of such terms as divinity, ritual, rite, and religion. Any phenomenon associated with the acts of remembering, commemorating, and perpetuating a unanimity that springs from the murder of a surrogate victim can be termed ‘religious.’”
His succinct conclusion: “Violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred.”
Where Girard Jumps The Shark
If you find this definition of religion and the sacred unsatisfying, you are not alone. Girard wields his theory like a man with a hammer gone looking for nails.
While there are many myths that track almost perfectly with his theory, there are many others that do not align so obviously, forcing Girard to engage in all sorts of machinations to find collective murder at the heart of things. Menstrual blood is blood, and therefore the universal taboos around it are really about violence. Sex can be violent, and childbirth is bloody and can be fatal, and therefore religious views on those things track back to sacrifice and the surrogate victim as well. Violence is contagious, and plague is contagious, so myths about plague are definitely not about plague, which would be ridiculous. They, too, are about violence.
In fact, there is almost nowhere that the scapegoat mechanism cannot be found. Girard’s contortions range from the highly tenuous…
“The origin of symbolic thought lies in the mechanism of the surrogate victim; such has been the burden of my argument, particularly in my analyses of the myths of Oedipus and Dionysus. It is a fundamental instance of ‘arbitration’ that gives rise to the dual presence of the arbitrary and the true in all symbolic systems.”
…to the truly batshit insane:
“Cyclothymia is the term psychiatrists use to designate the alternating presence and absence of thymos. Every case of cyclothymia is characterized by mimetic desire and a strong competitive drive. Psychiatrists make the mistake of regarding cyclothymia as an essentially individual phenomenon… An individual perspective on cyclothymia fields only half the truth. In all such cases, when one person is high in the favor of fortune, another is low, and vice versa.
Modern psychiatry often fails to perceive the basic antagonism underlying the pathological manifestations of cyclothymia, because all traces of conflict have vanished. The physical violence, even the harsh language of the tragic confrontation no longer manifests itself; the adversary himself has disappeared, or appears in a static form that conceals the reality of the agonistic process.”
Sloppy gestures at a Theory of Everything aside, one of the biggest problems for Girard is that violence doesn’t work exactly the way that he thinks it does.
Girard opens the book with a reference to the work of Konrad Lorenz, an Austrian ethologist who developed a hydraulic model of emotional or instinctive pressures that build up until they are released. This theory, already highly criticized by the time of Violence and the Sacred’s publication, has largely been dismissed by modern science.
The word catharsis appears nine times in Violence and the Sacred, and the concept is alluded to far more frequently:
"Medea, like Ajax, reminds us of a fundamental truth about violence; if left unappeased, violence will accumulate until it overflows its confines and floods the surrounding area. The role of sacrifice is to stem this rising tide of indiscriminate substitutions and redirect violence into 'proper channels.'"
Unfortunately for Girard, the best evidence that we have points in the opposite direction. Although displaced aggression is real, the tendency is also temporary, lasting only as long as the heightened state of arousal inspired by the original event. The hydraulic model predicts that people who vent their aggression should experience release, discharging their pent-up energy and becoming less aggressive afterwards. That is precisely the opposite of what happens.
In other words, violence begets more violence, not less - something that one would expect Girard to pick up on.
This complicates the scapegoat mechanism, but it doesn’t necessarily disprove it. Mob violence is a common phenomenon; an empirically-supported scapegoat mechanism could be something like displaced aggression leading to a threshold cascade of violence, directed towards a marginal victim whose very marginality serves as a Schelling point for collective ire, producing salutary results upon their death due to the pleasure of punitive satisfaction combined with the temporary unity produced by the common-enemy effect.
If, over the millenia that hominization and early cultural development occurred, one such collective murder were to coincide with a fortuitous turn of events - a change in the weather, an unexpected windfall in resources, the end of a plague or other affliction - then we have the basis for a ritualized practice.[3]
Although Girard’s use of the hydraulic model doesn’t destroy the scapegoat mechanism, it will prove quite fatal for some of his later preoccupations, as we will see in Part Three. But first, we must establish whether his theory deserves any serious consideration. Where - if anywhere - does Girard fit within the current debate surrounding the origins of religion and the sacred?
Part Two
The simplest place to begin with a theory of religion is by gathering the constituent parts. Unlike Girard, most thinkers on the topic are hesitant to pose a single origin for such a complex phenomenon. Accordingly, we shall look at each piece of the puzzle in turn and see what picture emerges.
Building Blocks of the Sacred
One of the foundational building blocks of religion, oddly enough, is play:
“PLAY is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing. We can safely assert, even, that human civilization has added no essential feature to the general idea of play. Animals play just like men.”
So begins Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, which advances the idea that play is both prior to and an essential part of all aspects of culture, including religion and the sacred. The argument for priority is simply stated above; animals play, and therefore play comes before culture. The connection to the sacred is slightly less intuitive, but as Huizinga defines the concept the shared characteristics become readily apparent:
“Here, then, we have the first main characteristic of play: that it is free, is in fact freedom. A second characteristic is closely connected with this, namely, that play is not ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ life. It is rather a stepping out of 'real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own.”
“Play is distinct from ‘ordinary’ life both as to locality and duration. This is the third main characteristic of play: its secludedness, its limitedness. It is ‘played out’ within certain limits of time and place. It contains its own course and meaning.”
“More striking even than the limitation as to time is the limitation as to space. All play moves and has its being within a playground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the ‘consecrated spot’ cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground.”
“Inside the play-ground an absolute and peculiar order reigns. Here we come across another, very positive feature of play: it creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection. Play demands order absolute and supreme. The least deviation from it ‘spoils the game’, robs it of its character and makes it worthless.”
These characteristics of play create what would later be termed the magic circle - a sphere outside of ordinary life, subject to its own rules and goals, done for purposes which do not align with (and occasionally run counter to) our more straightforwardly biological drives. Thus, among many other things, play can be identified as a sort of proto-ritual that forms an essential building block of religion and the sacred.
Another building block can be found in Guthrie’s Faces in the Clouds, the premise of which can be grasped from the title alone. He argues that religion is a product of systematic anthropomorphism. Agency-detection is probably insufficient on its own for a theory of religion, but it is, at a minimum, the foundation of myth.
Ritual and myth are symbiotic, and it is likely impossible to definitively determine which came first or which takes precedence. But if one is forced to make a choice, my money would be on ritual. Play comes before anthropomorphism and storytelling in the evolutionary chain, and ritual is also much more stable compared to myth[4], which is at least weak evidence in favor of the notion that ritual serves a function that myth is incorporated into, rather than the other way around.
We now have some notion as to form, but next to nothing in terms of content. Pascal Boyer offers us one lens in the form of minimally counterintuitive (MCI) concepts, which are those that violate one or two expectations while otherwise staying true to reality. Boyer argues that MCI concepts are memes that stick in the mind because they are close enough to reality to be legible yet different enough to be memorable. MCI concepts serve as a filter for the sort of stories that tend to proliferate, seen in everything from spirits to superheroes. In Boyer’s telling, there are a limited number of ways that MCIs can be created for maximum memetic capacity, and those specific combinations are precisely those that appear throughout the religions of the world.
Still, we are left with something of a black box marking the transition from play to ritual and story to religious myth. We have the means, but to what end?
The Purpose of the Sacred
In a word: order.
In every culture, the sacred is that which is set apart or forbidden, in contrast to the profane (the mundane, ordinary world). Durkheim therefore proposed that “religion was the organized attempt to bridge the gap between the known and the unknown, conceived of as the profane world of ordinary experience and a sacred, extraordinary world located outside that experience.”
His central move in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is arguing that the sacred is society experiencing itself. When people gather in ritual, festival, mourning, war, worship, chanting, dancing, sacrifice, or ceremony, the group generates an intensity no individual could produce alone. This collective effervescence, the communal act of universal participation in the same thought or action, creates a social energy that imbues objects, places, or rituals with the sacred. The very real feeling of communal transcendence then gets misattributed as something external and divine. Thus the sacred is the form in which collective life becomes visible and emotionally real to its members; it is how the community represents itself to itself, a way of ordering the world and society’s place within it.
However, this ordering is fragile. When social bonds weaken and the structures that bind individuals to collective life lose their grip, Durkheim's term for the resulting condition is anomie: normlessness, the collapse of the regulative framework that orients desire and gives action its meaning. Anomie is what the sacred holds at bay.
Peter Berger essentially takes this insight and inverts it: where Durkheim named the pathology, Berger names the cure. His nomos is the socially constructed order of meaning that shields human beings from the chaos of anomie. Religion becomes the “sacred canopy” when that nomos is projected onto the cosmos and thereby made to appear not merely social, contingent, and human-made, but sacred, necessary, and real.
Another universal aspect of the sacred is its obsession with purity and pollution - concepts that are inherently related to order, structure, and classification. From Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger:
“If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place. This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.”
Clean and dirty, pure and impure, are always relative; a clean street and a dirty bed are totally different in absolute terms, yet they are perfectly coherent concepts when placed within a system of structured expectations for how things ought to be. Douglas concludes that dirt is symbolic of that which sullies clean classifications, and things that are dirty or impure are those which fall outside or in-between the established structures of a society. Following this logic backwards to the beginning, she proposes that the sacred originates in the inherent need for humanity to impose order on what is a fundamentally disordered and unstructured experience.
Roy Rapaport converged on the sacred’s connection to order through yet a third avenue in Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity.[5] He begins by defining ritual as “the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers.”
This simple definition ties in to the concepts we’ve previously discussed quite nicely, while also filling in some gaps in our understanding. First, he provides a limiting factor in the transmission and evolution of rituals:
“Rituals composed entirely of new elements are, thus, likely to fail to become established (the test of establishment being that they be performed again on categorically similar occasions). Rituals composed entirely of new elements are, however, seldom if ever attempted. ‘New’ rituals are likely to be largely composed of elements taken from older rituals.”
This rhymes with Boyer. Just as myths that stick are minimally counterintuitive, changes in rituals are in some sense minimally innovative. Stray too far from established practices and you get something other than a new ritual.
In another way, however, the contents of ritual are selected for in a manner totally opposite of that of MCIs. Whereas myths must stay somewhat close to reality in order to remain memorable and comprehensible, ritual practices seek to be maximally different from ordinary life in order to demarcate the difference between sacred and profane:
“In taking ritual to be a mode of communication some of its strangest features – the separation in time and space of some rituals from daily life, the grotesque quality of some ritual postures and gestures, the weirdness of some ritual utterances, the exuberant elaboration of some objects and structures used in rituals – become clear. The effectiveness of signals is enhanced if they are easy to distinguish from ordinary technical acts. The more extraordinary a ritual movement or posture the more easily it may be recognized as a signal and not a physically efficacious act.”
Signaling works on another level as well. In societies where the basic task of survival is quite difficult, religious practices stand out as extraordinarily expensive in terms of time and resources. Costly Signaling Theory proposes that this a load-bearing point; the costliness of ritual, combined with the lack of material purpose, serves as a mechanism to enhance trust amongst the participants. Whether you really believe in the ritual is impossible to know, but the high price of participating in the ritual is a reliable signal that doesn’t require knowledge of a participant’s internal state.
Speaking of internal states, Rapaport notes that ritual serves as a form of communication to oneself:
“Moreover, given the extent to which in solitary rituals various parts of the psyche ordinarily inaccessible to each other may be brought into touch, and given the extent to which the emotions of participants may respond to the stimuli of their own ritual acts, it is reasonable to take ritual to be auto-communicative as well as allo-communicative... Auto-communication is, I will argue, of utmost importance even in public rituals. In fact, the transmitters of ritual's messages are always among their most important receivers…”
Rapaport also provides a way to differentiate ritual from games, which helps explain how Huizinga’s play becomes something more. Here he draws from the first chapter of The Savage Mind by Levi-Strauss:
“Games … appear to have a disjunctive effect: they end in the establishment of a difference between individual players or teams where originally there was no indication of inequality. And at the end of the game they are distinguished into winners and losers. Ritual, on the other hand, is the exact inverse; it conjoins for it brings about a union (one might even say communion in this context) or in any ease an organic relation between two initially separate groups, one ideally merging with the person of the officiant and the other with the collectivity of the faithful. In the case of games the symmetry is therefore preordained and it is of a structural kind since it follows from the principle that the rules are the same for both sides. Asymmetry is engendered: it follows inevitably from the contingent nature of events, themselves due to intention, chance or talent. The reverse is true of ritual. There is asymmetry which is postulated in advance between profane and sacred, faithful and officiating, dead and living, initiated and uninitiated, etc., and the ‘game’ consists in making all the participants pass to the winning side.”
Once again, unanimity makes an appearance as a fundamental characteristic of ritual and the sacred.
Lastly, we return to the concept of order. Rapaport grounds the purpose of ritual and the sacred in what he terms Ultimate Sacred Postulates (e.g., “There is no god but God”):
“In sum, the expressions I have called ‘Ultimate Sacred Postulates,’ those crowning bodies of religious discourse, typically possess certain peculiar features. On the one hand they can be falsified neither logically nor empirically. On the other hand they can be verified neither objectively nor logically. And yet they are taken to be unquestionable. I take this characteristic to be of the essence, defining sanctity as the quality of unquestionableness imputed by congregations to postulates in their nature objectively unverifiable and absolutely unfalsifiable.”
The circular, tautological logic of USPs is precisely the point:
“Meaningfulness, Wallace asserts, does not depend upon whether or not a message contains information but, rather, "has to do with the receiver's ability to respond to a message: that is, to respond to a small stimulus with a relatively large response"... Of fundamental importance here, and virtually explicit in Wallace's discussion: the meaning of ritual's informationlessness is certainty.”
The participants in ritual are continually communicating, both to the community and to themselves, that they subscribe to the foundational order of society. This order situates the community within the world, binding it together and orienting each member of the community towards themselves and each other. The Ultimate Sacred Postulate is the keystone, the focal point of ritual that also serves as the foundation of the cosmic order.
Synthesizing the Sacred
Taken together, all of these views of the sacred synthesize into something resembling a coherent whole:
- Play is the innate tendency that serves as the substrate for ritual, and agency-detection is the innate tendency that serves as the substrate for religious myth.
- When ritual appears, the two become intertwined and mutually reinforcing. Myth provides the metaphysical justification for ritual, and ritual provides the shared practice that invests the participants in myth.
- Rituals become sacred when they are able to generate collective effervescence. Categories and concepts become sacred because they mark the boundaries, liminal spaces, and contradictions of the order of the world.
- Certain types of myth get selected for due to the memetic qualities of minimally-counterintuitive concepts. Certain types of ritual practices get selected for because they either a) differentiate the sacred from the profane by being markedly different from the mundane, and/or b) because they are costly in a way that convinces both community and the participant themselves that they are invested in the sacred order.
- Rituals are also limited by what came before. They must not differ too greatly from previously established rituals or they fail to garner the unanimity that is required for a practice to become invested with the sacred.
- The sacred order eventually coalesces around an Ultimate Sacred Postulate which becomes the foundation of the entire religious edifice.
- Fully formed, the sacred order structures the social order (nomos) and connects it to the rest of the cosmos, thereby becoming religion and providing society with a sacred canopy that gives its people purpose and shelters them from anomie.
Every link in this chain makes sense and serves a purpose. But you may have spotted the missing link: “When ritual appears…” How does ritual begin? What produces that first moment of collective effervescence that later becomes ritualized? How does the community attach myth to ritual in a way that is unanimously accepted? And why does sacrifice appear so often, in such very specific forms?
Collective effervescence can be found in festivals, funerals, dancing, singing, chanting, war - all activities that are natural and organic to humans. But why should sacrifice be a natural and organic feature of human experience?
Similarly, there are many categories and concepts where the sacred, in its role of demarcating and defining the boundaries of ordinary existence, can be expected to gather: birth, death, sex, rites of passage, etc… Once the practice of sacrifice has been established, its sacred qualities can be readily identified. But why does it emerge in the first place?
Sacrifice can be explained by Costly Signaling Theory, but only up to a point. The victim is an offering, yes, but why is it a surrogate as well? Why should it bear the sins of the community, unless the sins of the community were somehow involved? Why should animal sacrifice so often involve treating the animals as humans? Why should the victim be selected for as someone who will not engender a violent response, rather than as someone who will make the costliest and therefore most valuable offering? Why should the notion of vengeance be invoked so often around the sacrificial victim, when the community has unanimously decided that the victim should be sacrificed?
Unlike the others, Girard does not merely describe the sacred as it can be observed, or offer a contributing factor in the sacred’s development. He proposes the exact moment that the latter becomes the former, in a way that does quite a bit to explain the sacred in the specific form that it appears.
Consider the examples from the introduction. In all three cases, the eventual victim of sacrifice is both honored and punished. This makes sense only because we take the paradoxical nature of the sacred for granted, as something that is observed wherever the sacred appears. Other theories of the sacred make interesting points for why this should be the case, but none of them do so while also explaining the practice of sacrifice. The scapegoat mechanism does both; the victim is both blessed and cursed, celebrated and feared, honored and punished, because the victim is viewed as both the poison and the antidote. At the origin, the victim is seen as both the cause and the solution of the society’s problem.
Girard overreaches in countless ways, but he should be credited for developing a plausible problem that the practice of sacrifice solves, and a plausible mechanism for how that solution generates the sacred in a way that explains a wide variety of otherwise-mysterious phenomena. While the scapegoat mechanism does not explain nearly as much as he would like, it is a good candidate explanation for the origin of sacrifice and provides a great deal of insight into the nature of the sacred itself.
Part Three
That rather tepid endorsement of Girard’s scapegoat mechanism may seem like not nearly enough juice for the squeeze. And indeed, I view Girard’s foray into fundamental anthropology as the least interesting aspect of his work. We can only speculate on where the sacred came from; the far more important question is, where did it go?
The Uniqueness of Christianity
Girard briefly alludes to the Judeo-Christian tradition in Violence and the Sacred as something deserving of future study. He did exactly that in his subsequent works, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. In a somewhat Nietzschean move, Girard identifies Judeo-Christianity as unique among the world’s religious traditions.
For Girard, the scapegoat mechanism is fundamentally the product of misattribution. The collective murder of the victim creates a temporary unanimity among the community suffering a mimetic crisis of reciprocal violence. The victim, having solved the crisis by their death, is therefore retroactively blamed for having caused it in the first place.
Sacrifice, once established as a practice, eventually becomes a sort of unfalsifiable form of evidence in favor of the guilt of the victim. A victim is sacrificed in order to end a plague or a famine or some other misfortune. If the misfortune continues, then the sacrifice was either flawed or insufficient. Another sacrifice must be made, a process that continues until conditions improve, at which point the process has apparently worked and will be replicated yet again in the future.
Girard considers the Judeo-Christian tradition unique in that, from the very beginning, it explicitly highlights the innocence of the victim. Human sacrifice is always considered to be something foreign, a practice of other cultures in offering to other gods. The animals who are sacrificed in the Old Testament are innocent of wrongdoing, obviously, and are sacrificed on behalf of the wrongdoing of others. More generally, the stories of the Bible are always told from the perspective of the victim. Abel is the innocent victim of Cain, Joseph is the innocent victim of his brothers, Naboth is the innocent victim of Ahab. The entire Book of Job is a reversal of the ordinary tendency to victim-blame[7]; instead, Job suffers in spite of his innocence. The Psalms of the Persecuted are written from the perspective of those who suffer at the hands of the mob. And Christ is the ultimate innocent, the perfect Lamb who suffers for the sins of the world.
As Christianity spread throughout the world, first as religion and second in the form of secularized ideology, the misapprehension that allowed the scapegoat mechanism to function began to degrade. Girard believed that this deprived society of its core mechanism for generating the sacred.
In a roundabout way, he may have been right.
The story of modernity is a story of secularization. The decline of the sacred can be simplistically explained as the decline of religion in general, but the reality is both more complex and more interesting.
Girard’s focus on the importance of Christianity makes a great deal of sense when we consider the specifically Christian origins of many of the political ideals we take for granted. Universal moral equality, equality under the law, and universal human rights can all be traced back to Saint Paul’s famous phrase in Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” The idea that the suffering of the powerless constitutes a moral claim on the powerful is a Christian inversion (Nietzsche’s “slave morality”) that became the entire grammar of modern progressive politics. Christian charity, the obligation to help one’s fellow man, led to social welfare. The Christian emphasis on repentance, mercy, and the possibility of moral transformation became the liberal preference for rehabilitative justice over purely punitive systems. The sovereignty of individual conscience, immortalized in Martin Luther’s Here I Stand speech, established the individual's inner life as a domain no authority can legitimately violate. This served as the foundation of freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, and freedom of thought. Even the separation of church and state has Christian roots: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.”
This last piece - the separation of religious and political authority - is intimately related to the concept of sovereignty itself.
Sovereignty and the Sacred
The word sacred derives from the Latin sacer, and the homo sacer (translated as both sacred man and accursed man, in good Girardian fashion) was a peculiar figure in Roman law. The homo sacer was an outlaw, in the sense that he could be killed by anyone and was excluded from ordinary life. He was also sacred, in the sense that he was forbidden from being sacrificed. This legal definition marks a revealing intersection of the sacred and the political, which Agamben explores in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.
The sacred is that which is set apart and forbidden, marking the boundary of ordinary reality. Similarly, the sovereign marks the boundary of political reality; Agamben borrows Carl Schmitt’s definition of the sovereign as “he who decides on the state of exception” to show how the homo sacer marks this joint boundary of the political and the sacred through his very exclusion from political and religious order. Agamben then builds on this analogy to show how modern governments make similar distinctions between those who are political beings (citizens) and those exceptions who are merely bodies (bare life).
The Failures of the Secular Sacred
The sacred has always been political. The unanimity required to generate the sacred in the first place is also an inherently political process of consolidating authority and punishing heretics. Until quite recently in human history, political authority always depended on the sacred for its legitimacy.
As secularization progressed, the two became increasingly distinct. Religion became confined to the private sphere, which required secular authority to justify itself in secular terms. Despotism became harder to justify without divine providence behind it, and so democracy reemerged as a method of legitimizing political authority.
During roughly the same time frame, science proceeded to demystify the world and dismantle the underpinnings of religion in the process, hastening the aforementioned transformation of religious values into secular political values.
Together, these historic forces proceeded to fundamentally change the basic rationale of society. The previous social contract, founded on a shared religious view of the good and the social order, was replaced with a secular social contract founded on progress. The rapid advances of science led to a belief in technological progress. The rise of capitalism, coupled with new technologies, led to a belief in economic progress. And the equally rapid advances in the social and political realms led to a belief in moral progress.
This radical reorientation of society worked almost seamlessly, until it didn’t. The liberal dream of secular humanism died from a thousand cuts.
Technological progress proved insufficient as a foundational piece of a secular sacred order, for the simple reason that all new technology is still wielded by human beings and therefore subject to all of our flaws and vices. The same technology that took us to space can be used to wipe out a city of millions in the blink of an eye. The same technology that allows us to speak to our loved ones on the other side of the planet can be used to surveil us 24/7. The same technology that has gifted us with more entertainment options than ever before can be used to hack our reward circuits and enslave our attention. That’s not to say that technology has not wildly improved the lives of basically every person alive today, because of course it has. Rather, the salient point is that we as a society no longer believe in technological progress as the road to salvation (if such a time ever truly existed in the first place).
The dream of economic progress, while perhaps not dead, is certainly ailing. It is surely no coincidence that as soon as capitalism triumphed over communism as the economic order of the world, the societal focus changed from capitalism’s virtues to all of its flaws. Those who believe that capitalism is antithetical to human values overstate their case, but it is undeniably orthogonal to human values. Capitalism may be the best system we have, but it has obvious limitations that make it unsuitable for most as a believable path to a better paradigm. On the low-end of the socioeconomic spectrum, progress has stalled out or even reversed in recent decades. But it is actually the high end of the socioeconomic spectrum that is probably the most to blame for the end of economic progress as a unifying social goal. While most of the discourse around the American dream is rightfully directed towards its decline as a realistic possibility for many, the success cases are hardly more encouraging. Past a certain point, increases in wealth fail to produce corresponding increases in happiness. How can economic progress be a meaningful societal end when such an end fails to generate meaning?
Social and moral progress have stalled out as well. After centuries of major advances, we appear to have plucked most of the low/hanging fruit. Once we stopped being overtly and cartoonishly evil to huge swathes of the population, we were left with countless smaller evils that have few obvious villains and even fewer obvious solutions.
Democracy, another casualty of our increasingly cynical age, no longer holds the imagination in quite the same way that it used to. The wise have always been afraid of the tyranny of the majority, which is why democratic countries are really forms of republicanism in the first place. Rule by the one, the few, the many… it’s trade-offs all the way down. Who now would die in the name of majority rule? For that matter, who now would call what we have democracy, or even democratic, in anything but the most technical sense? “Democratic-by-comparison” is a far cry from a rallying cry.
And what of liberalism itself? It, too, labors under the weight of its own contradictions.
What do we mean, when we say equality? There are hard limits to how far we can raise up the lowest among us, despite our best efforts. Equality of outcome ends at “Harrison Bergeron”, which is about as illiberal of an outcome as can be imagined. But equality of opportunity is hardly more fair. The more we control for nurture, the more that nature becomes the sole determining factor in life outcomes. What could be less fair than genetics?
This and other complications - Popper’s paradox of tolerance, Polanyi’s double movement - have been much discussed. But as it relates to the sacred, there is a problem at an even more fundamental level:
The basic logic of liberalism amounts to a denial of sovereignty, yet sovereignty persists.
Equality under the law and universal human rights - two of the foundational principles of liberalism - preclude the possibility of exception. Everywhere, exceptions abound. The law is binding and all-encompassing, until it isn’t.
The President must secure Congressional approval in order to declare war. The United States has therefore not fought a war since World War II, despite the curious names of the Korean War, Vietnam War, and War on Terror. The UN charter prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of member-states, a fact which was surely of great comfort to Mossadegh, Árbenz, Allende, Noriega, Milošević, Saddam, Gaddafi, and now Maduro. For anyone who still believes that the fig leaf of national sovereignty is anything other than conditional on convenience, Palestine and Taiwan would like a word.
Labor law guarantees the rights and dignity of workers. As Agamben would be the first to point out, such laws only apply to citizens. The undocumented worker is Agamben's bare life made economically productive - included in the labor market precisely through their exclusion from the legal order, valuable exactly to the degree that they cannot claim the protections nominally extended to everyone who does what they do. Foreign laborers producing goods for Western supply chains fare little better, as Apple, Nike, Nestlé, and Coca-Cola can well attest.
Wherever there is law, there is exception. Banks that are too big to fail, detainees who are neither criminals nor prisoners-of-war, enhanced interrogation techniques that are torturous but not torture. There is almost no limit to the innovations of expediency. Where exception is needed but in conflict with ideals, sovereignty can take refuge in secrecy; secret laws, secret courts, secret sites, secret sovereigns.
The point here is not cynicism for cynicism’s sake. Nor should these critiques - of liberalism, democracy, capitalism, science, humanism, and technological progress - be interpreted as implicit endorsements of their respective alternatives (e.g., conservatism, neo-reaction, communism, religion, Luddism, etcetera etcetera). The argument is diagnostic, not prescriptive, and it can be summed up as follows:
At the dawn of civilization, the political order was founded within and upon the sacred order; the sacred was the source of sovereign authority and its raison d'être. The sovereign didn’t just enforce the nomos - he embodied it, uniting the cosmos and nomos so that all of society could shelter beneath the sacred canopy.
The gradual separation of church and state, culminating in the total secularization of the political order and the confinement of religion to the private sphere, resulted in the inversion of this ancient arrangement. Secular sovereignty requires secular justification, removing the sacred from its historical position as the source of authority. If the sacred canopy is culture, then the transition from sacred to secular authority marks the point where culture becomes downstream of power. Sovereign power became responsible for embodying and maintaining the nomos, as before, but with the crucial difference of the sacred being a product of sovereign authority rather than its progenitor.
Again, this worked for a time, as men lived and died for political ideals rather than religious ones. But one by one, those ideals were forced to face reality.
The democratization of the political order, intended to empower a sovereign people, failed to overcome the iron law of oligarchy: “Who says organization, says oligarchy.” Sovereignty, once concentrated into accountable entities, became diffuse and opaque.
The liberalization of the political order, intended to empower the law by eliminating exceptions, failed to overcome the iron law of sovereignty: “Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” Unable to eradicate sovereignty, liberalism proceeded to delegitimate it instead.
Liberal democracy fails as a nomos, is unable to generate the sacred and unify society beneath the sacred canopy, because the principles of liberalism lack the defining characteristic of Ultimate Sacred Postulates: unfalsifiability. Rational values are subject to rational critique, and that which can be criticized cannot be canonized. We cannot muster the unanimity required to make our values sacred anymore, because we can see with our own two eyes the results.
If the sacred is that which is set apart and unquestionable, what happens when our values demand that we question everything?
Nothing is sacred, or so it is said. And so it is.
The Decline of the Sacred
Girard believed that the spread of Christianity and its secular ideological descendants had impeded the functioning of the scapegoat mechanism. A society built on notions such as the presumption of innocence and due process for all is one that is unable to properly rally against a scapegoat. He viewed this as a fundamental crisis of civilization; without a tried and true method to defuse escalating mimetic rivalry and the resulting reciprocal violence, nothing stood in the way of violence at a truly apocalyptic scale.
You can see the shape of the argument, if you squint. The Cold War looks an awful lot like mimetic rivalry at the societal level, and certainly the 20th century suffered from an unprecedented outbreak of mass violence.
As we’ve already discussed, Girard’s theory has a fundamental flaw. Violence does not operate according to the hydraulic model, as pressure that builds until it achieves catharsis. The lack of legitimate outlets for violence is not a flaw of modern society, but a feature; violence begets violence, and peace begets peace.
If Girard’s theory were correct, we would see an increase in violence that correlates with the decline of the sacred. Instead, the evidence appears to point in the opposite direction. While Pinker may have overstated his case somewhat in Better Angels of Our Nature, we can at least feel fairly confident that people are not becoming more violent than in the past. And while the extraordinary violence of the 20th century might seem to be a point in Girard’s favor, it seems not to have occurred to him that violence on an industrial scale could be the result of industrialization.
The more you think about it, the more this aspect of his theory fails to make sense. If “violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred”, shouldn’t the two rise and fall together?
In my opinion, this is precisely what has happened.
In the modern, secular usage of the term, the sacred is that which we hold to above all else. But what does that mean, really? What makes the sacred more than just empty words? What differentiates something sacred from something that is merely important?
Violence is the litmus test.
A society must be willing to inflict violence in order to defend that which it holds sacred. It must protect the sacred from those who would profane it, or else the sacred won’t remain sacred for long.
Similarly, individual members of a society must be willing to suffer violence in defense of the sacred, in addition to inflicting violence on society’s behalf. If you are not willing to die for something - or to kill for it - can you really be said to hold it sacred?
My thesis is simple: violence is the heart of the sacred, and our experience of the sacred has diminished in exact proportion to our willingness to suffer and inflict violence.
The willingness to inflict violence has declined with our ability to identify suitable targets. Liberal values have set an increasingly high bar for the legitimate exercise of violence, which sovereign authority has repeatedly failed to clear. Moreover, scientific materialism has called into question the very concept of culpability.
If all of us are nothing more than a combination of nature and nurture, how can we be guilty of anything? People are fucked up in all sorts of ways, but no one is fucked up for no reason. And a world where those reasons are not their fault is a world without villains.
Eric Hoffer’s famous line from The True Believer illuminates the scope of the problem:
“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.”
And here we are, with neither a belief in god nor a belief in the devil. Is it any wonder that unity becomes ever harder to find?
Without a common foe to rally against, the next best thing is a common vision to rally toward. It is here that the failures of liberalism, democracy, and the current world order do their true damage. The reason that the falsifiability of liberalism matters is not because liberalism doesn’t work. For all its flaws, society has improved in extraordinary ways within living memory. The problem is not progress, which will likely continue apace. Rather, we have the problem of paradise.
Untold numbers have given their lives in the name of heaven, when heaven was an abstract notion. But who now believes in the possibility of heaven on earth? Even if we could solve absolute deprivation, how do we solve relative deprivation? How does anyone solve the hedonic treadmill? What could heaven possibly look like, when built by the hands of men?
Government of the people, by the people, for the people is still a government made up of people, prone to all of the things that people in power tend to do. Without the foibles of fascism and communism, the current world order has had to justify itself on its own terms. It has been weighed, it has been measured, and it has been found wanting. Yet there are little to no alternatives on the horizon. This paradigm is the paradigm for the foreseeable future. Progress can and will be made, but systematic progress feels impossible given our current constraints.
Men will fight and die for life, perhaps even now for liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But how many will die for slightly more freedom, or to prevent slightly more unhappiness?
Without the promise of paradise, we are left without a belief in heaven but never without a belief in hell.
In his “Critique of Violence”, Walter Benjamin distinguished between law-founding and law-preserving violence. Law-founding violence, as the name implies, founds a new legal order. The problem of paradise cuts the legs out from under any attempt at law-founding violence, because anyone with a brain is well aware of how hard it is for things to get better and how easy it is for things to get worse. Within a liberal regime, only the illiberal are willing to inflict violence in the name of progress. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
Law-preserving violence scarcely fares better in modern society. Foucault coined the term biopolitics to describe the shift in the last few centuries from sovereign power to biopower. His version of sovereign power is fundamentally subtractive - it has the right to take life or let live. Biopower inverts this: it's the power to make live and let die. The state becomes a manager of populations, measuring its success through birth rates, mortality tables, public hygiene, epidemiology, and economic productivity. Life itself becomes the object of political calculation.
If the nomos of society is explicitly oriented towards the optimization of life, then on what grounds can it ask you to die on its behalf?
When combined with extraordinarily high standards for the legitimate exercise of violence, a nomos based on biopolitics makes those who participate in law-preserving violence appear both foolish and immoral. This can easily be seen through the pity and outrage directed at veterans of recent wars, as well as the heightened animosity directed at the police and other law enforcement personnel.
All of these factors contribute to the decline in our commitment to violence. We have no god or heaven to fight for, no devil to fight against, and no reason to fight at all when the agreed-upon purpose of life is to maximize personal fulfillment.
That’s not to say that we have nothing we are willing to fight for - family, for one, is still sacred. But the difference in scope between now and the not-too-distant past is stark. Consider Elias’ description of satisfaktions-fähige networks in 19th-century Germany, in which an upper-class Prussian could not withdraw from a duel, even if it would certainly end with his death:
"To give up and go away would not only have meant losing his position, but also losing everything which gave his life meaning and fulfillment.”
Today we tell young men in similar circumstances not to throw their lives away, and such counsel is good and wise. To die over an insult is to sacrifice all good things, all possibilities of the future, for the intersubjective notion of honor, which has no meaning other than that which we give it. But our ongoing crisis of meaning hints that such a worldview is not without cost.
The decline of the sacred has not led to apocalypse, as Girard predicted, but anomie. Modernity did not free us from the sacred by replacing it with reason; it gave us values too rational, revisable, and self-critical to become fully sacred.
Where do we go from here? God only knows.
Footnotes
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Although he doesn’t use the term, one presumes that the distinguishing characteristic between animal mimicry and mimesis is theory of mind.
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It should be noted that it is quite difficult to separate homophily (the tendency of similar individuals to cluster together) from contagion. Are people infecting each other with violence, or is it simply that violent people move in the same circles? Causation aside, the analogy between violence and epidemics is quite useful in terms of prediction and intervention.
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To be clear, this is a steelman of Girard; as far as I can tell, he seems to think that the catharsis of collective murder is sufficient for the creation of the sacred - no fortuitous coincidences required.
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Christmas is an obvious example of how this works. Many Christmas traditions have their origins in pagan celebrations of the winter solstice. Today, Christmas has lost much of its Christian content as society has become less religious, yet the traditions persist. This is the argument in favor of ritual in a nutshell. The meaning surrounding rituals can change quite dramatically, yet the ritual itself will stubbornly continue in modified form. The relative malleability of myth in comparison to ritual offers some indication that the functions of ritual are more important. There are many complicating factors, of course; for one, the social functions that make ritual more stable than myth may be a later development and have nothing to do with the question of origin.
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Of all of the sources discussed, Rapaport’s book is the most interesting and the most impressive. For the sake of brevity[6], his ideas are presented here without elaboration or justification, which would require a review-length treatment itself. But I encourage anyone interested in the subject to check out his stuff.
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See Mary Douglas’ Cultural Theory of Risk for more.
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Relatively speaking.