Fred's Updates en-US Fri, 27 Sep 2024 10:32:46 -0700 60 Fred's Updates 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Comment281231852 Fri, 27 Sep 2024 10:32:46 -0700 <![CDATA[Fred commented on Clif's review of Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment]]> /review/show/6856442404 Clif's review of Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment
by Allen C. Guelzo

Excellent food for thought, Clif.

Your closing paragraph reminds me that our present two-party democracy, as great as it is, puts severe limitations on ethical action. As long as one party (or even one ethically challenged leader of one party) believes it thrives best by oppressing the classes beneath it, progress will be stalled. ]]> Rating774855394 Fri, 27 Sep 2024 10:23:00 -0700 <![CDATA[Fred Heeren liked a review]]> /
Fred Heeren liked Clif Hostetler's review of Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment:
Our Ancient Faith by Allen C. Guelzo
"The author Allen C.Guelzo begins this book with an introduction that describes the disposition of democracy and why in human history it is so unusual and prone to failure. Some critics of democracy have concluded it is too weak to survive the forces of authoritarianism while other critics believe democracies have evolved to be too strong and have become allies with political authoritarianism. It’s at this point that Guelzo introduces the rest of the book with, “It will be worth our while to examine what he [Abraham Lincoln] says about democracy.�

Guelzo has written a number of other books about Lincoln. (view spoiler) So what prompts the writing of this book at this time? Apparently Guelzo sees threats to American democracy in today’s political climate and, referring to Lincoln, he puts it thus, “I take up his principles with the yearning that once again, this last, best hope of earth may yet have a new birth of freedom.�

The subtitle of this book is descriptive of the book's content, but I was a bit puzzled by the title, Our Ancient Faith, which conjures religious material in my mind. The title is based on an 1854 speech by Lincoln that identified the Declaration of Independence as the source of his "ancient faith."
If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal;� and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.
This book explores what Lincoln thought about various aspects of democracy in America while also providing historical and philosophical context along the way. Perhaps some of the remedies Lincoln offered as a defense of the “American experiment� can also serve us today.

Below are my brief summaries of each chapter. The summaries are a mixture of my writing and excerpts that are edited such that I don't provide quotation marks in many cases.

1. The Cause of Human Liberty

It is important to be continually vigilant, even in a democracy, because there are too many who are only too happy to be masters and have others as slaves. Thus democratic government needs sufficient guardrails to encourage patience while the democratic process works its way through issues and conflicts.

2. Law, Reason, and Passion

Calm reasoning recognizes that respect for criminal and civil law permits citizens to live in peace. But passions caused by perceived differences in ways of life between the North and South led to the Civil War. As the war came to a close the danger of anger and malice on the part of the victors posed a threat to social and political healing. Also, passion motivated the assassin's bullet.

3. An American System

Promoters of free labor loved "the old Puritan character," not for its "theological doctrines," but for its strenuous commitment to work as a good in itself. Free labor promised mobility, movement aspiration; it was the entire opposite of a system in which one person literally owned the life and labor of another. "The hired laborer with his ability to become an employer, must have every precedence over him who labors under the inducement of force," Lincoln said. And why? because "free labor has the inspiration of hope," while "pure slavery has no hope."

4. Political Economy and the Nation

For Lincoln the fundamental rule of economics was improvement, whether in the form of canals or social mobility. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Lincoln's free-labor economy increasingly began to feel dated against the background of rapid, large-scale industrialization

5. Democratic Culture

There are cultural assumptions that help to predispose a people to democracy in the first place. These assumption underly respect for the law and are currents of something more volatile and not easily seen. It was Lincoln's ideal to master himself and to be mastered by no one else, and that expressed his idea of democratic culture, as well as democracy.

6. Democracy and Civil Liberties

One of the embarrassing truths about democracies is that they can be stampeded into states of emergency and climates of crisis which end up trampling civil liberties. Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus was a very undemocratic thing to do. The Constitution does provide for a suspension of habeas corpus in "cases of rebellion or invasion." Lincoln showed great restraint in the use of that power. Abraham Lincoln's hesitation to quash law and democratic liberties may be one of the most important gifts we inherit from him.

7. Democracy and Race

Democracy should not be about race. Democracy is based on reason, debate, persuasion, or at least reasonable self-interest, while race is a non-rational factor that thrives on ineffable intuitions of group qualities and appeals to the basest of political passions. In spite of Lincoln's reputation as the great emancipator, based on today's standards many things Lincoln said and apparently thought were racist. He was a man of his time and needed to survive in the political climate of his time.

8. Democracy and Emancipation

Unlike abolitionists of his time Lincoln manifested little energy in demanding the immediate and unconditional end of slavery. But this can be explained when his understanding of the slavery crisis and his preference for economic gradualism are taken into account. If Lincoln holds out to us anything instructive about liberal democracy, it is that liberal democracy can wear away even the irrationality of race.
James Oakes has said that Lincoln was not (as he is sometimes understood to be) an emancipator who was restrained by his limited thinking on race, but a limited thinker on race whose limitations were overthrown by his passion for emancipation.
9. Democracy's Deficits

Lincoln was aware of the deficits in a democracy, and that "popular sovereignty" could yield to unthinking passion. Both North and South, Union and Confederate, abolitionist and slaveholder had had opposing expectations and made opposing demands of God. And both were wrong. Democracy is a government for humanity, not angels, and it has to be content to be aspirational, yet to live with the pace of aspiration.

Epilogue: What If Lincoln Had Lived?

Lincoln had greater political skills than his successor Johnson, so it's possible some things would have gone smoother than the history that occurred. However, the political, economic, and social forces were such that the overall alternative history under Lincoln probably would not have been much different.
__________________
The following excerpts from this book and discussion questions were prepared by David Nelson for the Vital Conversations group.
“What Americans must do in this new age, he reasoned, is to ‘re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it.’� (14)
Can we assign new understandings to ancient words? Can we reclaim the Declaration of Independence today with the many changes that have taken place?
“But Lincoln’s only attempt at actually defining democracy occurred, almost in passing, in a note he jotted on the eve of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and at the moment, it was more of an effort to set democracy apart from slavery: ‘As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.’� (25) “’According to our ancient faith,� Lincoln said in 1854, ‘the just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed.’� (25)
CONSENT was a key concept for Lincoln. What does it mean today for you?
“It did not matter that technically, democracy is a political system and slavery an economic one, for in Lincoln’s mind, the boundary between economics and politics was thin to the point of evaporation.� (30)
Discuss the relationship between politics and economics. Lincoln was more concerned with saving the union than ending slavery.
“But the premises on which they erected those rational structures were inherited from authority, and especially the authority of the Bible or Aristotle, or both in tandem. What distinguished the Enlightenment’s reason was the breaking up of the authority of those premises, and the employment of reason as an authority itself, to persuade rather than to threaten.� (38) “In Lincoln’s concept of democracy, reason stood on one side, passion and ‘outrages committed by mobs� stood on the other.� (41)
Discuss the difference between reason and passion.
“But he (Lincoln) struggled to be guided by ‘the dictates of prudence, as well as the obligations of law,� and labored to convince himself that reason would eventually prevail, even among the Southern public... Is it passion which will make some of us slaves, and others of us masters? It is a question which, to Lincoln’s dismay, was not precisely answered, except by an assassin’s bullet.� (47)
Can we change people’s opinions and behavior with logic and reason OR with stories and feelings? What has been your experience?
“In Lincoln’s world, there need be no slaves and no masters except the self-driven and the self-mastered. To see such a world prevail became the cause of his life.� (63)
Do you have a cause for which you are willing to live and to die?
“Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865 cut short his life, but not the trajectory of his economic reconstruction of the Union. Even had there been no civil war, it is safe to say that Lincoln’s administration would still be regarded as a hinge presidency in American history, if only for the way his economic policies inaugurated a new political generation that glorified free labor, protective tariffs, and federal encouragement for infrastructure while pushing back against the Jeffersonian glorification of agriculture and its animus against commerce...he was denounced, then and now, as the architect of a new, more expanded and intrusive federal government ... that can better expand the welfare state, regulate the economy, or adopt socialism.� (74)
The Homestead Act and the transcontinental railroad have impacted this nation and the world. How has your life be impacted by the presidency of Lincoln?
He (Lincoln) was inviting, not the descent of a veil of ignorance about the right or wrong of slavery, but a pure confession of guilt from the limited stumbling realization ---that all Americans had been invested in the evils of slavery, that all had suffered in the war that ended it –that Lincoln could hope for a democracy that rose above the giddiness of venom...There was no question that slavery was beyond some ‘consensus�, but that did not mean that its human perpetrators were beyond forgiveness.� (153)
Have we been faithful to Lincoln’s invitation for remembrance and confession? What have you learned about slavery and America in this book and in your conversations?
“Even in its faults, then and now, democracy is still the best method for people to live lives free from domination and exploitation at peace with themselves and with others, embodying ‘a progressive improvement in the condition of all men...and augmenting the happiness and value of the life to all peoples of all colors everywhere.� Lincoln, then, was not wrong to trust that ‘our principle, however baffled, or delayed, will finally triumph...men will pass away � die � politically and naturally, but the principle will live, and live forever.� (171)
In the final weeks before the elections of 2024, are you in agreement with this final paragraph, no matter who is elected President?"
]]> Review6715854204 Tue, 03 Sep 2024 21:59:13 -0700 <![CDATA[Fred added 'Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy']]> /review/show/6715854204 Parliamentary America by Maxwell L. Stearns Fred gave 4 stars to Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy (Hardcover) by Maxwell L. Stearns
bookshelves: re-shelve
Haven’t bothered doing reports on the books I’ve been reading for some time, but here’s one I needed to write up recently for my Provocateurs and Peacemakers group:

PARLIAMENTARY AMERICA: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy
By Maxwell L. Stearns, a constitutional law professor and professor of Law and Economics for over 3 decades.

In the months and probably years ahead, more and more of us are going to be thinking about possible fixes for the extreme polarity that characterizes our country and government. Maxwell Stearns is here with an answer that is radical just where it needs to be, yet doable with three amendments to our constitution. Admittedly, many more of us will have to be desperate before such amendments might get passed � but that day may come.

Main points:
- The two-party system guarantees not everyone will be represented.
- We’re in the midst of a 3rd Constitutional crisis.
- We can learn from other democracies that have certain features that work better than ours.
- Our present system doesn’t allow, practically, for more than 2 parties.
- 3rd parties can only serve as spoilers or randomizers, making our vote meaningless.
- But when we have 5 parties, or 6 or 8 parties, and a system where they need to form coalitions to form a majority government, more of us can be represented: And our politicians are forced to work together, meaning politicians are no longer elected according to their ability to appeal to an ever-more extreme party base, but in large measure according to their ability to collaborate effectively, to serve more people.
- So this parliamentary, muti-party system that Stearns proposes is a more representative democracy, representing more viewpoints, more people.

Stearns begins by showing how we are in the midst of a 3rd Constitutional Crisis:
What were the first two?
- First was the framing of the constitution itself: This was after the American Revolution, when the 13 states were ineptly ruled by our Articles of Confederation, which gave the states all the real power and the Congress �1 branch—tried to raise taxes and regulate commerce but the states just said: ”No thanks� and erected trade barriers against each other and gutted the economy. The Philadelphia Convention was supposed to address all this, not to write a constitution, but they ended up writing the constitution, which made “we the people� a higher power than the states. And Stearns point was we learned from our mistakes and we weren’t afraid to make things up as we went along, to build on what England and other governments had learned through the centuries.

- The second constitutional crisis was the Civil War, along with the period of Reconstruction that followed it. The Reconstruction Amendments couldn’t survive Lincoln’s death when his southern-sympathizing successor Andrew Johnson took office and the North prematurely withdrew their troops so that the amendments were no longer enforced, depriving Blacks of their recently granted civil rights. But the point is, we eventually started making these critical changes, these amendments, once again in the spirit of continuing to “form a more perfect union� and “promote the general Welfare.� We changed in reaction to the crisis.

And today, according to Stearns, we’re in the midst of a 3rd constitutional crisis, which is the result of a 2-party presidential system that isn’t working.
He explains that the framers of our constitution explicitly wanted to avoid the birth of parties or factions; yet the constitution they wrote paved the way for our presently entrenched 2-party system, which we’ve been accommodating for over 2 centuries.

Says: “The two-party system creates a zero-sum power struggle—a party is either in power or in opposition.� [Your side is either represented, or you’re opposed to your government.]
And: “The 2-party system not only suffers from the limited range of candidates; it also suffers from the voters� inability to express at the ballot box what they care most deeply about.� [p. 212]

He describes our present voting system, with its primary-caucus cycle and then our votes filtered through the Electoral College of 538 electors: Which has produced the “third-party dilemma� �
so that each time a third presidential candidate and party run a campaign, they have no real ability to compete against the 2-party system, but they do have the ability to take more votes away from one side than the other, and become spoilers, which is what happened in 2000 with Ralph Nader, helping George W. Bush beat Al Gore.

But another possibility is that third parties can become randomizers, meaning they pull votes from both other parties so that the election really becomes a matter of chance: As in 1992 with Ross Perot weakening George H.W. Bush against Bill Clinton, and back n 1980 John Anderson’s 3rd party helping to make the outcome between Reagan and Jimmy Carter a matter of chance.

Stearns explains that: “Our voting process rewards strategy over sincerity, and it increasingly plays to the base of each party rather than the center of our politics.�
And describes how, esp since 1994, this has pushed the center of both parties farther and farther apart.

The heart of the book is a tour of a number of current democracies around the world, which alone is worth the price of the book. He shows the strengths and weaknesses of each system, and we see where he gets his ideas for the best features to adapt as our own. So he tells us about the various kinds of parliamentary democracies in England, France, Germany, Israel, Taiwan, Brazil, and Venezuela.

Some of these, like Germany, have come up with a system to “never again� allow a fascist party to gain power, called MMP, mixed-member proportionality. This combines two kinds of governing members: those elected by their party, and those elected by their districts. So voters each cast two ballots, one for a candidate running for their district (like our U.S. House district), and one for their party. So the 2nd ballot determines the party proportional representation in their Bundestag, their parliament. So for citizens, both their geographical concerns and their ideals are represented.
Most of these governments are set up to encourage multiple parties. But not just any tiny extreme group can form a party. There’s always a threshold, whether minimum of 5 or 10 % or whatever, so they often end up with between 4 and 8 parties. The Netherlands has a less than 1% threshold, so I guess they could end up with dozens of parties.

Stearns created a chart (p. 166) where he shows where each country falls within 3 categories along the side: presidential, hybrid, or parliamentary � and 3 categories along the top: purely districted, hybrid, and purely proportional.

Our own form of government falls under the category of presidential and purely districted, AKA 2-party presidentialism, which was in place earlier than most of these other democratic systems, before anyone could learn from our history, and its considered a combination of some of the worst democratic features in terms of what our system has become today, falling short of its original intent to promote a separation of powers, and checks and balances, because its extreme partisanship in recent years has impeded effective governance and widened cultural gaps—the opposite of promoting “the general welfare� as intended.

He says: “The greatest threat to a democracy is extremes. Once we recognize the general failings, or threats, associated with presidentialism and executive hybrids, it is clear that we must consider the alternative of parliamentary democracy. The question is which parliamentary system is most effective. MMP is a conceptual midpoint between the extremes of the United Kingdom’s strictly districted approach and Israel’s pure proportionality.� (p 167)
And: “A parliamentary MMP system encourages voters to vote sincerely for parties that reflect their ideological views, rather than admonishing them strategically to select the least bad of two options.� (p. 168:)

He proposes to do all this with 3 amendments:
1 Expanding the House of Representatives,
2 Having House party coalitions choose the president, and
3 Giving the House the power to terminate the presidency of a president who loses their confidence by failing to do the job well.

So for the FIRST AMENDMENT, voters will cast two ballots, first for named candidates in their geographical districts, as today, and second for one in a list of qualifying parties, those that meet a 5% threshold. This second ballot creates more parties, and it means the House will double in size from 435, under current law, to 870 members.

What this accomplishes is this, he says: “With multiple parties in the House, no party is ensured a majority, thus making coalition building among parties essential�. Today, compromise is all too often regarded as a sign of political weakness�. Coalition building rewards cooperation, not ever-widening entrenchment.� (p. 178)
He says it also ends incentives for hyper-partisan gerrymandering, because the parties and the issues take center stage.

The SECOND AMENDMENT—having House party coalitions choose the President—lessens the campaign expense and the power of money and shortens our absurdly long campaign season and bypasses the electoral college. It avoids the cult of personality and also rewards the citizen’s sincere expression of political preferences and gives them greater input on public policy.

And with Mixed Member Proportionality, he says, it “lets voters express preferences outside the over-simplified liberal-to-conservative dimension.� (213z)
He says: “Coalitions that broaden perspectives, accommodate competing views, and moderate the extreme edges of he most strident ideologies improve outcomes for more citizens.�

The THIRD AMENDMENT reinvents Presidential removal through use of the “no confidence� vote, which overall can create more confidence in a good leader.
Our present system of impeachment has turned out to be mostly for show, as in the case of the four impeachments of Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump twice, none producing a conviction. Nixon was the only one ever to be convicted.

A no-confidence vote strengthens the separation of powers. The current power of the President makes party loyalists hesitant to cross him. “Congressional leaders will be more willing to hold a deeply problematic president accountable if their political fortunes no longer depend upon executive grace.� [219]

The amendment replaces “high crimes and misdemeanors� with “Maladministration.� And it spells out 4 categories of maladministration [p. 224x].

He lays out the process for how he thinks this reformed system can be put in place, which comes down to these three amendments being accepted by a 2/3-vote by Congress.

The constitution has been amended 27 times before, but there are people who benefit from the current, 2-party system who would fight it, like small states that benefit from the electoral college, and people who love partisan politics.

He examines other proposals for change, most of them smaller ones like implementing ranked choice voting or dumping the electoral college, but gives reasons why none of these fix the 2-system.

So he says: Whenever the crisis becomes obvious to enough people, here’s a plan and a way forward, giving us specific changes that will solve the worst of our present problems with our 2-party system.

He gives the proposed text for his three amendments in the appendix. ]]> Review6788051125 Sat, 31 Aug 2024 12:27:28 -0700 <![CDATA[Fred added 'Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture: Dialogues on the Origin of Culture']]> /review/show/6788051125 Evolution and Conversion by Ren Girard Fred gave 5 stars to Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture: Dialogues on the Origin of Culture (Kindle Edition) by Ren Girard
PART 2 OF MY SUMMARY/REVIEW OF EVOLUTION AND CONVERSION

Near the end of the Joseph story in Genesis, Girard shows how it takes the mythic form and puts it in reverse, uncovering the places where someone is portrayed as DESERVING of scapegoating. So we have incident after incident where Joseph is scapegoated by his brothers, who are envious of him; and we get the story of their selling him into slavery in Egypt, Joseph being accused of adultery by the Egyptians, etc., � but in each case, we see he’s innocent.

Then when Joseph has the upper hand against his brothers who had sold him into Egypt and are now coming into Egypt having to request food from Joseph (who they don’t recognize years later dressed as an Egyptian lord), he fills their sacks with grain but hides a silver cup in the youngest son Benjamin’s bag. So when the silver is found on their way out, Judah offers to become Joseph’s slave in Benjamin’s stead, so that Benjamin and the rest can return safely with grain to their father.

Normally this would have been another chance to show how someone like Benjamin is accused because he was caught red-handed, because he really committed the crime, like Oedipus.

But instead, this is when Joseph reveals the ruse, reveals himself, and forgives his brothers of scapegoating him. Instead of crime and punishment, there’s a forgiveness and redemption.

So Girard says: “It is not just the Oedipus myth that is contradicted by the Joseph narrative, but the very structure of myths themselves. The myth always asks the question, “is he guilty?� and provide the answer: ‘Yes.� Jocasta and Laios are right to expel Oedipus, since he will commit parricide and incest. Yes, Thebes is right to do the same, since Oedipus has committed parricide and incest. The mythical narrative always confirms that the heroes are guilty. In the case of Joseph, everything works in reverse. The hero is wrongly accused. The question is the same, but the answer opens our eyes to an entirely different world.� [144]

Girard shows how the Bible illustrates the gradual turn from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice to the end of all sacrifice with Christ. And he gives the example of Abraham’s “almost-sacrifice� of Isaac, where, again, Isaac is shown as innocent and is not made to become a sacrifice, when a ram shows up and becomes the substitute. And then the prophets go much further in the many instances when they say: Actually, God doesn’t want your sacrifices at all—and Girard quotes God’s desires in Psalm 40:6: “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but you have given me an open ear. Burnt offering and sin offering you did not require.�

Girard says that his discovery that only the Hebrew and Christian scriptures characteristically recognized the victims as innocent was the main step that led him to become a Christian himself [p. 33]. The “conversion� in the book’s title refers to his own. He says this is the natural result of confronting the fact that “you are part of the mimetic mechanism which rules human relationships,� and his need to acknowledge “the fact that he himself is implicated [by this] observation.� Before this, he says, he was more “like Martin Heidegger, who believes that he stands apart from any mimetic influence from his social surrounding�. Therefore, in the moment in which everybody became Nazi around him, Heidegger became Nazi too.�

Girard says: “We will always be mimetic, but we don’t� have to be so in a satanic fashion. That is, we don’t have to engage in perpetually in memetic rivalries. We don’t have to accuse our neighbor; instead, we can learn to love him.� [162]

When he talks about the meaning of “conversion,� Girard talks about positive and negative action. On the positive side, he says it means to imitate Jesus or someone like Jesus. Remember what Paul said to the Corinthians: ‘I urge you to imitate me� (1 Cor. 4:16). He did so not out of personal pride or self-righteousness but because he himself imitates Jesus, who, in turn, imitates the Father.� So conversion means choosing Christ or a Christlike individual as a model for our desires.

On the negative side, Girard says: “Conversion means to become aware that we are the persecutors. It means seeing oneself as being in the process of imitating from the very beginning. Conversion is the discovery that we have always, without being aware of it, been imitating the wrong kind of models, who lead us into the vicious circle of scandals and perpetual frustration." [160]

Some might wonder if Jesus really just carries on the archaic or Old Testament idea of sacrifice. For them, Girard calls our attention to a way of understanding the story about the two prostitutes who came to Solomon for justice. When they woke up in the morning with one child dead and one alive, both claimed that the live one was theirs, and not the other woman’s. So Solomon suggested that they cut the baby in half, and the real mother said: “No, let her have the child!� Girard says: “The Gospels read the bad woman and the bad sacrifice as a metaphor of the old humanity, unable to escape violence without sacrificing others. Christ, through his own sacrifice, frees us from this necessity. We have then to use the word ‘sacrifice� as self-sacrifice, in the sense of Christ. Then it becomes viable to say that the primitive, the archaic, is prophetic of Christ in its own imperfect way. No greater difference can be found: on the one hand, sacrifice as murder; on the other hand, sacrifice as the readiness to die in order not to participate in sacrifice as murder.� [155]

Girard concludes: “�. The moral history of humanity is the shifting from the first to the second meaning, accomplished by Christ but not by humanity, who did everything to escape this dilemma, and above all not to see it.� 155

A history of sacrifice, says Girard, “would show that archaic religions are the real educators of mankind, which they lead out of archaic violence. Then God becomes victim in order to free man of the illusion of a violent God, which must be abolished in favor of Christ’s knowledge of his Father. One can regard archaic religions as a prior moment in a progressive revelation that culminates in Christ.� 156

His interlocutors ask: “Don’t you think that this account you have just provided seems overdetermined by a linear progression from archaic myths to Christianity?� Girard answers: “I must agree that there is a sense of progress. I have no problem in saying that it is indeed progress to recognize the innocence of the victim, and that is what Christianity does.� 157

-END- ]]> Review6788022617 Sat, 31 Aug 2024 12:08:35 -0700 <![CDATA[Fred added 'Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture']]> /review/show/6788022617 Evolution and Conversion by René Girard Fred gave 5 stars to Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (Paperback) by René Girard
PART 1 OF MY REVIEW
Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture, by René Girard,
with Pierpaolo Antolello and João Cezar De Castro Rocha

The book was first published in Portuguese and French in 2005 when Girard was 77 years old. At the conclusion of his career as a professor at Stanford, two fellow literary critics (from Cambridge and U. of Manchester) proposed that they interview him to get his thoughts on the many questions they had about his thinking and career. I’m reviewing (well, summing up) the Bloomsbury paperback English edition from 2008.

As with many books, the subtitle is more informative than the title. This is a book about how human cultures originate. It’s also about how they evolve—and it’s about the evolution of Girard’s own thought over his lifetime: how he developed the big ideas for which he is renowned. So his interlocutors ask him about many of the thirty books he wrote and how his theory came together over the course of his career. The questions are setups for Girard’s extensive answers—but most of these are hardball questions, giving Girard a chance to answer his critics.

Trained as an historian, René Girard early strayed into literary criticism and anthropology—and to a lesser degree, psychology and philosophy as well. The big ideas he is known for are two: “mimetic desire� and “the scapegoat.� His study of the great novels across several modern languages and then across the ancient myths of diverse cultures made these two inferences inescapable, he says. In most of the classics, and in the actual history of most civilizations, he recognized these two themes playing out again and again. He began to look for these after noticing how many of the classics and myths tell the story of an original murder. In that sense, his investigation has been into the greatest of murder mysteries.

His interlocutors compare Girard to Darwin, who had been searching through the data until he finally found “a theory by which to work.� For Girard, this was the “mimetic mechanism,� which could be found at the origin of every culture. The mimetic mechanism begins “with mimetic desire, which triggers the start of a psychological and grand societal process.

Unlike other animals, humans lack much of the instinctual motives to know exactly what to do with their lives. Like other animals, we desire food, sex, shelter, etc.—but our deepest desires don’t come naturally. And so we observe others to see what they desire. Neuroscientists are learning about the importance of mirror neurons, which peoiple use not only when we perform certain actions, but when we watch other perform those actions.

So Girard says it becomes clear that parents, peers, and cultural icons provide models that shapes our desires; we not only imitate their fashion, but their goals. We desire what they desire (mimetic desire). But as people start desiring the same objects (mates, positions, wealth), they come into conflict over them, because the most valuable objects most desired are also most rare. So mimetic desire inevitably leads to the next step: mimetic rivalry.

He says that soon this rivalry becomes all-consuming, because as the conflict between one person and his rival escalates, the rival fights back, and the object becomes less important than the winning of the conflict, for both individuals. Girard calls these two individuals “doubles,� and their conflict becomes self-reinforcing. Witnesses to this conflict tend to be drawn into it. When “two people are fighting over the same object, then this object seems more valuable to bystanders,� and more people are drawn into the fray. The desire and the aggression is contagious.

Eventually the conflicts multiply and spread through the whole society, leading to violence, anarchy, and a stage Girard calls the “mimetic crisis.� Societies cannot last long in this state, and leaders who recognize this will look for solutions to create unity again. Here is where Girard proposes his other great discovery: the “scapegoat resolution.� Girard says that the most effective means to “save the community from total self-destruction � is the convergence of all collective anger and rage towards a random victim, a scapegoat�. In the frenzy of the mimetic violence of the mob, a focal point suddenly appears, in the shape of the ‘culprit� who is thought to be the cause of the disorder and the one who brought the crisis into the community. He is singled out and unanimously killed by the community.�

So the scapegoat or victimary mechanism “channels the collective violence against one arbitrarily chosen member of the community, and this victim becomes the common enemy of the entire community, which is reconciled as a result.�

This “founding murder� then becomes ritualized into a sacrificial system, and becomes the origin of both a new religion and a new society, so that the society is equipped to cope with their mimetic desires and avert or solve future crises. Soon the scapegoat mechanism is forgotten or concealed, because who wants their religion or culture to be founded on murder? So the original murder is ritualized into a sacred rite; the sacrifice is repeated regularly.

Girard would say that after the original murder, the society does all it can to erase, not record, the memory of the elements related to the innocence of the scapegoated victim. The problem here: This renders the assumed-but-missing elements unfalsifiable. Girard replies that he has seen the pattern emerge on occasions that are “so numerous, ubiquitous and consistent that any doubt disappears.� [118]. Still, he admits, it requires detective work, because “everybody is lying,� � “the ones who do the lynching truly believe that their scapegoats are guilty and therefore deserve to die,� and so we can expect coverups and false stories to be passed down as tradition. [131]

From my own study, I see seven main features that characterize the scapegoating mechanism Girard describes, helping us to identify it where it exists within myths, legends, classics, or the archeological record. When I survey Girard’s examples for these seven features, I see some share all of them, and others that have at least 5 of the 7 elements. In most cases, some features are either missing or unclear.

Features of scapegoating mechanism:
1. Sacrificial murder of innocent human victim
2. Time: near the founding of the culture
3. Circumstance: Society in crisis
4. Cultural belief that the gods can be appeased or appealed to on the basis of this human sacrifice
5. Belief that the victim is guilty or culpable for the crisis
6. Later divinization of the victim
7. The first murder is regularly re-enacted with ritual sacrifices thereafter, whether of human or something else.

EXAMPLES:

When the interlocutors ask Girard about his early discoveries in the 1960s, he speaks of his reading Greek tragedy and his particular fascination with the Oedipus myth, which featured an outsider with a lame foot who was blamed for the plague in Thebes, thus becoming the scapegoat to stop the plague.

Girard recognized analogous victimizing elements in Euripides� The Bacchae, in which Bacchanalia celebrants run into the woods in a frenzy, not recognizing the king (whose father founded Thebes) as human when they spear him and tear him apart. The collective murder thus became associated with the founding of Thebes.

Similarly, Girard speaks of how he was struck, early on, by the “mimetic content� of Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar. The conspirators against Caesar are easily recruited for the murder because of their mimetic desires as they recognize their hatred for, or jealousy over, the same object. By centering the story on the tragedy of Caesar’s death, Shakespeare did something the Greeks seldom did in their tragedies: he shows how the tragic hero or victim may not be as deserving of murder as his killers imagine. Once again, the hero’s collective murder is located near to the foundation a new society. The “mimetic desires� of Caesar’s “friends� turn to mimetic rivalry and thence to murder, resulting in the birth of the Roman Empire.

Girard gives examples of how he was impressed by execution stories from early histories and myths of Rome. The story of Tarpeia is the story of the collective murder of an accused traitor, the daughter of a Roman commander who was said to have betrayed the city by opening the gates for the attacking Sabines. Expecting to be covered in gold and jewelry, as promised, she was instead covered by their shields to crush her to death.

From that time on, traitors were punished by being thrown from a cliff named “the Tarpeian rock.� Girard sees this as being related to the executions by the crushing of victims who were accused and then stoned to death in Leviticus. In all these cases, the community participates by “killing at a distance,� where “everyone participates but nobody is responsible.� Girard calls this “a way of uniting the community when you have neither the central power nor judicial system that can prevent mimetic conflicts.� And in all these cases, a nation is just at the cusp of formation: the formation of the Roman state, the establishment of the Hebrew state in its promised land.

He refers to the pagan guru Apollonius of Tiana, which strikes me as one of the clearest pieces of myth or history to fit Girard’s sacrificial pattern: Apollonius cures the plague in Ephesus by choosing a vagabond beggar to be stoned as the cause of the epidemic. He was proven correct when the people start to remove the corpse and find a demonic monster instead of a man. His murder/sacrifice, the Ephesians are led to believe, has cured the city. [p. 28]

Girard finds early illustrations of mimetic rivalry in the Brahmanas of the Indian Vedas, which center on the rituals of sacrifice to have desires met, and of the South African Venda myth of Python and his two wives, one which is accused of scaring away a divine snake and thus causing a drought. She is then killed as a “beer offering� by drowning in front of the community, to stop the drought.

According to the Roman legend of Romulus and Remus, these two brothers argued over which hilltop to build a city. To settle the matter they devised a contest to see which would receive the approval of the gods. Remus refused to accept the result and so insulted the new city; so Romulus killed his brother Remus, and then continued to found the city of Rome, along with its institutions, its military, and its religious rituals. In Livy’s version of the story, Romulus may also have been murdered�"torn limb from limb by the senators,� according to a secret tradition that Livy says had “filtered down� to him.

Girard sees the same kind of mimetic desire, rivalry, murder and city-founding in early Genesis, where Eve is induced by the serpent to desire the forbidden fruit, and Adam mimetically follows Eve’s desire for the same object. Cain’s murder of Abel begins with Cain’s envy of his brother, whose sacrifice was accepted by God while his was rejected (similar to Romulus and Remus). Girard points out the Bible’s recognition of envy as immoral in its command from the Decalogue: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house � wife � or anything that belongs to your neighbor� � a clear prohibition of mimetic desire.

In the Gospels, Jesus more positively asks us to imitate him, rather than our neighbor, which if practiced, avoids the mimetic rivalry.

But Girard sees in Cain and Abel, as in Romulus and Remus, the picture of the founding of the first civilization. After murdering his brother, Cain goes off to the east and builds a city (and civilization has its etymological origin in civil and citizen, related to the city). Girard associates Cain, civilization's founder, with this murder of his brother, because as he is sent away after murdering Abel, the law against murder is given: “If anyone kills Cain, he will suffer vengeance seven times over� (Genesis 4:15). Girard says proposes that “law represents the foundation of culture, because capital punishment is already ritual murder.� So capital punishment by stoning, as prescribed in Leviticus is the repetition of the original murder, re-enacted and with the participation of the whole community. And the law given back in the story of Cain’s crime is immediately followed up by the beginnings of civilization, with a description of the domestication of animals, the origins of music, and the origins of metallurgy with bronze and iron tools.

Another example they discuss is the Prometheus myth, about how Prometheus brought humans all the arts of civilization and was then made a sacrificial victim when Zeus chained him to a rock and sent an eagle to eat his liver every day.

They discuss Richard Dawkins and his theory of memes to describe a minimal unit of cultural transmission, though Girard says Dawkins has no awareness of mimetic rivalry.

Scapegoats can be chosen almost randomly—or they may become the victim when they recognize the innocence of other victims, or the arbitrariness of their scapegoating or the cultural inequities that the system is promoting. This is what happened to Socrates, when he spoke out against the inequities of the system. In Plato’s Republic, a character says that a truly just man will be accused of injustice and “be scourged, racked, bound, � and, at last, after suffering every kind of evil, he will be impaled.�

Girard points out such treatment and accusations against Job, as well as the servant of the Lord in Isaiah, and especially of Jesus, where Jesus is the clearest illustration of the scapegoat mechanism because of the way he speaks out against the establishment and on behalf of their injustice toward the oppressed and thereby flags himself as the a scapegoat to his persecutors. In John’s Gospel, when the high priest Caiaphas addresses the council, he tells them: “it is expedient for you that one man die for the people, and that the whole nation not perish.� And John says: “So from that day on they planned together to kill him.�

Girard sums up the significance of most cultures� ignorance of the scapegoat mechanism they relied upon: “In a nutshell: before the advent of Judaism and Christianity, in one way or the other, the scapegoat mechanism was accepted and justified, on the basis that it remained unknown. It brought peace back to the community at the height of the chaotic mimetic crisis. All archaic religions grounded their ritual precisely around the re-enactment of the founding murder. In other words, they considered the scapegoat to be guilty of the eruption of the mimetic crisis. By contrast, Christianity, in the figure of Jesus, denounced the scapegoat mechanism for what it actually is: the murder of an innocent victim, killed in order to pacify a riotous community. That’s the moment in which the mimetic mechanism is fully revealed.� [61]

He says: “I think that the unconscious nature of sacrificial violence is revealed in the New Testament, particularly in Luke: “‘Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing’� (Luke 23:34). And in Acts, also written by Luke, Peter later addresses the crowd who had been there for the crucifixion and says “You acted in ignorance� (Acts 3:17).

Ethologist Konrad Lorenz, in his observations of animal behavior, recognized prehuman dispositions that anticipate scapegoating. In his book On Aggression, he describes how, when two geese approach each other, they show signs of hostility, but most of the time the aggression is redirected and discharged against a third object, and Girard describes this as “a kind of incipient scapegoating mechanism, even if it isn’t proper to call it scapegoating since the third element often is an inanimate object.� But the couple quickly bonds over the mutual aggression toward a third party or object.

Similarly, Lorentz refers to human laughter as a form of redirected aggression, as when a group of people laugh at someone as a kind of gentle scapegoating, and we notice an empathic bond immediately developing within the group.

What human beings add, showing the large leap from lower animal culture to human culture, is the symbolic sphere, which Girard says is essential to the ritual re-enactment of the scapegoat mechanism. But how does this symbolic ability emerge? For Girard, symbolic ability and the scapegoat mechanism are tied together from the start. Chimpanzees carry out collective killings and eating of their victims, usually chosen from lower, monkey species. Girard theorizes that over hundreds of thousands of years, our hominid ancestors were involved in collective killings and experienced peace and solidarity as a result, leading them to want to repeat the event. The transition to symbolic ritual happened as they became capable of staging such a repetition, using a surrogate victim. But this required a larger brain—meaning that the need for a symbolic understanding of a symbolic substitute, a “scapegoat,� provided the necessary selective evolutionary pressure. [77]

Girard claims: “It is only with Christ that the mechanism is uncovered, and also today this discovery is not yet complete. Nobody is yet able to answer Christ’s question: “What is the meaning of that which is written: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone�? (Luke 20:17)�. If the scapegoat mechanism is our common cultural ‘ancestor,� ritual sacrifice is an intermediate step in the evolution of cultural forms, while social institutions are mature forms derived from this process.

He says that his “main evidence is ritualistic violence, even more than myths.� [120] Evidence of human sacrifice in earliest cultures comes to us from primitive societies in both the old and new worlds. Girard draws our attention to Phoenician culture, who anthropologists once argued, had no such actual practice except in certain ancient literature. “Since that time,� says Girard, “archeologists have discovered an entire cemetery of sacrificial victims close to Carthage [a Phoenician colony], where they exhumed half-burned infants mixed together with animals. [102]

I’d also note that we now have good archeological evidence for many ancient cultures around the world practicing human sacrifice, often of children, because of belief that the gods demanded what was most valuable. I’d note the Inca children recently discovered after being drugged on coca and buried alive near the summit of Llullaillaco, a dormant volcano where they were perfectly preserved by the cold, dry conditions. In life these children appear to have been children of rulers and nobles.

Near the end of the Joseph story in Genesis... - SEE PART 2 ]]> Review6788051125 Sat, 24 Aug 2024 17:37:50 -0700 <![CDATA[Fred added 'Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture: Dialogues on the Origin of Culture']]> /review/show/6788051125 Evolution and Conversion by Ren Girard Fred gave 5 stars to Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture: Dialogues on the Origin of Culture (Kindle Edition) by Ren Girard
PART 2 OF MY SUMMARY/REVIEW OF EVOLUTION AND CONVERSION

Near the end of the Joseph story in Genesis, Girard shows how it takes the mythic form and puts it in reverse, uncovering the places where someone is portrayed as DESERVING of scapegoating. So we have incident after incident where Joseph is scapegoated by his brothers, who are envious of him; and we get the story of their selling him into slavery in Egypt, Joseph being accused of adultery by the Egyptians, etc., � but in each case, we see he’s innocent.

Then when Joseph has the upper hand against his brothers who had sold him into Egypt and are now coming into Egypt having to request food from Joseph (who they don’t recognize years later dressed as an Egyptian lord), he fills their sacks with grain but hides a silver cup in the youngest son Benjamin’s bag. So when the silver is found on their way out, Judah offers to become Joseph’s slave in Benjamin’s stead, so that Benjamin and the rest can return safely with grain to their father.

Normally this would have been another chance to show how someone like Benjamin is accused because he was caught red-handed, because he really committed the crime, like Oedipus.

But instead, this is when Joseph reveals the ruse, reveals himself, and forgives his brothers of scapegoating him. Instead of crime and punishment, there’s a forgiveness and redemption.

So Girard says: “It is not just the Oedipus myth that is contradicted by the Joseph narrative, but the very structure of myths themselves. The myth always asks the question, “is he guilty?� and provide the answer: ‘Yes.� Jocasta and Laios are right to expel Oedipus, since he will commit parricide and incest. Yes, Thebes is right to do the same, since Oedipus has committed parricide and incest. The mythical narrative always confirms that the heroes are guilty. In the case of Joseph, everything works in reverse. The hero is wrongly accused. The question is the same, but the answer opens our eyes to an entirely different world.� [144]

Girard shows how the Bible illustrates the gradual turn from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice to the end of all sacrifice with Christ. And he gives the example of Abraham’s “almost-sacrifice� of Isaac, where, again, Isaac is shown as innocent and is not made to become a sacrifice, when a ram shows up and becomes the substitute. And then the prophets go much further in the many instances when they say: Actually, God doesn’t want your sacrifices at all—and Girard quotes God’s desires in Psalm 40:6: “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but you have given me an open ear. Burnt offering and sin offering you did not require.�

Girard says that his discovery that only the Hebrew and Christian scriptures characteristically recognized the victims as innocent was the main step that led him to become a Christian himself [p. 33]. The “conversion� in the book’s title refers to his own. He says this is the natural result of confronting the fact that “you are part of the mimetic mechanism which rules human relationships,� and his need to acknowledge “the fact that he himself is implicated [by this] observation.� Before this, he says, he was more “like Martin Heidegger, who believes that he stands apart from any mimetic influence from his social surrounding�. Therefore, in the moment in which everybody became Nazi around him, Heidegger became Nazi too.�

Girard says: “We will always be mimetic, but we don’t� have to be so in a satanic fashion. That is, we don’t have to engage in perpetually in memetic rivalries. We don’t have to accuse our neighbor; instead, we can learn to love him.� [162]

When he talks about the meaning of “conversion,� Girard talks about positive and negative action. On the positive side, he says it means to imitate Jesus or someone like Jesus. Remember what Paul said to the Corinthians: ‘I urge you to imitate me� (1 Cor. 4:16). He did so not out of personal pride or self-righteousness but because he himself imitates Jesus, who, in turn, imitates the Father.� So conversion means choosing Christ or a Christlike individual as a model for our desires.

On the negative side, Girard says: “Conversion means to become aware that we are the persecutors. It means seeing oneself as being in the process of imitating from the very beginning. Conversion is the discovery that we have always, without being aware of it, been imitating the wrong kind of models, who lead us into the vicious circle of scandals and perpetual frustration." [160]

Some might wonder if Jesus really just carries on the archaic or Old Testament idea of sacrifice. For them, Girard calls our attention to a way of understanding the story about the two prostitutes who came to Solomon for justice. When they woke up in the morning with one child dead and one alive, both claimed that the live one was theirs, and not the other woman’s. So Solomon suggested that they cut the baby in half, and the real mother said: “No, let her have the child!� Girard says: “The Gospels read the bad woman and the bad sacrifice as a metaphor of the old humanity, unable to escape violence without sacrificing others. Christ, through his own sacrifice, frees us from this necessity. We have then to use the word ‘sacrifice� as self-sacrifice, in the sense of Christ. Then it becomes viable to say that the primitive, the archaic, is prophetic of Christ in its own imperfect way. No greater difference can be found: on the one hand, sacrifice as murder; on the other hand, sacrifice as the readiness to die in order not to participate in sacrifice as murder.� [155]

Girard concludes: “�. The moral history of humanity is the shifting from the first to the second meaning, accomplished by Christ but not by humanity, who did everything to escape this dilemma, and above all not to see it.� 155

A history of sacrifice, says Girard, “would show that archaic religions are the real educators of mankind, which they lead out of archaic violence. Then God becomes victim in order to free man of the illusion of a violent God, which must be abolished in favor of Christ’s knowledge of his Father. One can regard archaic religions as a prior moment in a progressive revelation that culminates in Christ.� 156

His interlocutors ask: “Don’t you think that this account you have just provided seems overdetermined by a linear progression from archaic myths to Christianity?� Girard answers: “I must agree that there is a sense of progress. I have no problem in saying that it is indeed progress to recognize the innocence of the victim, and that is what Christianity does.� 157

-END- ]]> Review6788022617 Sat, 24 Aug 2024 17:24:01 -0700 <![CDATA[Fred added 'Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture']]> /review/show/6788022617 Evolution and Conversion by René Girard Fred gave 5 stars to Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (Paperback) by René Girard
PART 1 OF MY REVIEW
Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture, by René Girard,
with Pierpaolo Antolello and João Cezar De Castro Rocha

The book was first published in Portuguese and French in 2005 when Girard was 77 years old. At the conclusion of his career as a professor at Stanford, two fellow literary critics (from Cambridge and U. of Manchester) proposed that they interview him to get his thoughts on the many questions they had about his thinking and career. I’m reviewing (well, summing up) the Bloomsbury paperback English edition from 2008.

As with many books, the subtitle is more informative than the title. This is a book about how human cultures originate. It’s also about how they evolve—and it’s about the evolution of Girard’s own thought over his lifetime: how he developed the big ideas for which he is renowned. So his interlocutors ask him about many of the thirty books he wrote and how his theory came together over the course of his career. The questions are setups for Girard’s extensive answers—but most of these are hardball questions, giving Girard a chance to answer his critics.

Trained as an historian, René Girard early strayed into literary criticism and anthropology—and to a lesser degree, psychology and philosophy as well. The big ideas he is known for are two: “mimetic desire� and “the scapegoat.� His study of the great novels across several modern languages and then across the ancient myths of diverse cultures made these two inferences inescapable, he says. In most of the classics, and in the actual history of most civilizations, he recognized these two themes playing out again and again. He began to look for these after noticing how many of the classics and myths tell the story of an original murder. In that sense, his investigation has been into the greatest of murder mysteries.

His interlocutors compare Girard to Darwin, who had been searching through the data until he finally found “a theory by which to work.� For Girard, this was the “mimetic mechanism,� which could be found at the origin of every culture. The mimetic mechanism begins “with mimetic desire, which triggers the start of a psychological and grand societal process.

Unlike other animals, humans lack much of the instinctual motives to know exactly what to do with their lives. Like other animals, we desire food, sex, shelter, etc.—but our deepest desires don’t come naturally. And so we observe others to see what they desire. Neuroscientists are learning about the importance of mirror neurons, which peoiple use not only when we perform certain actions, but when we watch other perform those actions.

So Girard says it becomes clear that parents, peers, and cultural icons provide models that shapes our desires; we not only imitate their fashion, but their goals. We desire what they desire (mimetic desire). But as people start desiring the same objects (mates, positions, wealth), they come into conflict over them, because the most valuable objects most desired are also most rare. So mimetic desire inevitably leads to the next step: mimetic rivalry.

He says that soon this rivalry becomes all-consuming, because as the conflict between one person and his rival escalates, the rival fights back, and the object becomes less important than the winning of the conflict, for both individuals. Girard calls these two individuals “doubles,� and their conflict becomes self-reinforcing. Witnesses to this conflict tend to be drawn into it. When “two people are fighting over the same object, then this object seems more valuable to bystanders,� and more people are drawn into the fray. The desire and the aggression is contagious.

Eventually the conflicts multiply and spread through the whole society, leading to violence, anarchy, and a stage Girard calls the “mimetic crisis.� Societies cannot last long in this state, and leaders who recognize this will look for solutions to create unity again. Here is where Girard proposes his other great discovery: the “scapegoat resolution.� Girard says that the most effective means to “save the community from total self-destruction � is the convergence of all collective anger and rage towards a random victim, a scapegoat�. In the frenzy of the mimetic violence of the mob, a focal point suddenly appears, in the shape of the ‘culprit� who is thought to be the cause of the disorder and the one who brought the crisis into the community. He is singled out and unanimously killed by the community.�

So the scapegoat or victimary mechanism “channels the collective violence against one arbitrarily chosen member of the community, and this victim becomes the common enemy of the entire community, which is reconciled as a result.�

This “founding murder� then becomes ritualized into a sacrificial system, and becomes the origin of both a new religion and a new society, so that the society is equipped to cope with their mimetic desires and avert or solve future crises. Soon the scapegoat mechanism is forgotten or concealed, because who wants their religion or culture to be founded on murder? So the original murder is ritualized into a sacred rite; the sacrifice is repeated regularly.

Girard would say that after the original murder, the society does all it can to erase, not record, the memory of the elements related to the innocence of the scapegoated victim. The problem here: This renders the assumed-but-missing elements unfalsifiable. Girard replies that he has seen the pattern emerge on occasions that are “so numerous, ubiquitous and consistent that any doubt disappears.� [118]. Still, he admits, it requires detective work, because “everybody is lying,� � “the ones who do the lynching truly believe that their scapegoats are guilty and therefore deserve to die,� and so we can expect coverups and false stories to be passed down as tradition. [131]

From my own study, I see seven main features that characterize the scapegoating mechanism Girard describes, helping us to identify it where it exists within myths, legends, classics, or the archeological record. When I survey Girard’s examples for these seven features, I see some share all of them, and others that have at least 5 of the 7 elements. In most cases, some features are either missing or unclear.

Features of scapegoating mechanism:
1. Sacrificial murder of innocent human victim
2. Time: near the founding of the culture
3. Circumstance: Society in crisis
4. Cultural belief that the gods can be appeased or appealed to on the basis of this human sacrifice
5. Belief that the victim is guilty or culpable for the crisis
6. Later divinization of the victim
7. The first murder is regularly re-enacted with ritual sacrifices thereafter, whether of human or something else.

EXAMPLES:

When the interlocutors ask Girard about his early discoveries in the 1960s, he speaks of his reading Greek tragedy and his particular fascination with the Oedipus myth, which featured an outsider with a lame foot who was blamed for the plague in Thebes, thus becoming the scapegoat to stop the plague.

Girard recognized analogous victimizing elements in Euripides� The Bacchae, in which Bacchanalia celebrants run into the woods in a frenzy, not recognizing the king (whose father founded Thebes) as human when they spear him and tear him apart. The collective murder thus became associated with the founding of Thebes.

Similarly, Girard speaks of how he was struck, early on, by the “mimetic content� of Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar. The conspirators against Caesar are easily recruited for the murder because of their mimetic desires as they recognize their hatred for, or jealousy over, the same object. By centering the story on the tragedy of Caesar’s death, Shakespeare did something the Greeks seldom did in their tragedies: he shows how the tragic hero or victim may not be as deserving of murder as his killers imagine. Once again, the hero’s collective murder is located near to the foundation a new society. The “mimetic desires� of Caesar’s “friends� turn to mimetic rivalry and thence to murder, resulting in the birth of the Roman Empire.

Girard gives examples of how he was impressed by execution stories from early histories and myths of Rome. The story of Tarpeia is the story of the collective murder of an accused traitor, the daughter of a Roman commander who was said to have betrayed the city by opening the gates for the attacking Sabines. Expecting to be covered in gold and jewelry, as promised, she was instead covered by their shields to crush her to death.

From that time on, traitors were punished by being thrown from a cliff named “the Tarpeian rock.� Girard sees this as being related to the executions by the crushing of victims who were accused and then stoned to death in Leviticus. In all these cases, the community participates by “killing at a distance,� where “everyone participates but nobody is responsible.� Girard calls this “a way of uniting the community when you have neither the central power nor judicial system that can prevent mimetic conflicts.� And in all these cases, a nation is just at the cusp of formation: the formation of the Roman state, the establishment of the Hebrew state in its promised land.

He refers to the pagan guru Apollonius of Tiana, which strikes me as one of the clearest pieces of myth or history to fit Girard’s sacrificial pattern: Apollonius cures the plague in Ephesus by choosing a vagabond beggar to be stoned as the cause of the epidemic. He was proven correct when the people start to remove the corpse and find a demonic monster instead of a man. His murder/sacrifice, the Ephesians are led to believe, has cured the city. [p. 28]

Girard finds early illustrations of mimetic rivalry in the Brahmanas of the Indian Vedas, which center on the rituals of sacrifice to have desires met, and of the South African Venda myth of Python and his two wives, one which is accused of scaring away a divine snake and thus causing a drought. She is then killed as a “beer offering� by drowning in front of the community, to stop the drought.

According to the Roman legend of Romulus and Remus, these two brothers argued over which hilltop to build a city. To settle the matter they devised a contest to see which would receive the approval of the gods. Remus refused to accept the result and so insulted the new city; so Romulus killed his brother Remus, and then continued to found the city of Rome, along with its institutions, its military, and its religious rituals. In Livy’s version of the story, Romulus may also have been murdered�"torn limb from limb by the senators,� according to a secret tradition that Livy says had “filtered down� to him.

Girard sees the same kind of mimetic desire, rivalry, murder and city-founding in early Genesis, where Eve is induced by the serpent to desire the forbidden fruit, and Adam mimetically follows Eve’s desire for the same object. Cain’s murder of Abel begins with Cain’s envy of his brother, whose sacrifice was accepted by God while his was rejected (similar to Romulus and Remus). Girard points out the Bible’s recognition of envy as immoral in its command from the Decalogue: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house � wife � or anything that belongs to your neighbor� � a clear prohibition of mimetic desire.

In the Gospels, Jesus more positively asks us to imitate him, rather than our neighbor, which if practiced, avoids the mimetic rivalry.

But Girard sees in Cain and Abel, as in Romulus and Remus, the picture of the founding of the first civilization. After murdering his brother, Cain goes off to the east and builds a city (and civilization has its etymological origin in civil and citizen, related to the city). Girard associates Cain, civilization's founder, with this murder of his brother, because as he is sent away after murdering Abel, the law against murder is given: “If anyone kills Cain, he will suffer vengeance seven times over� (Genesis 4:15). Girard says proposes that “law represents the foundation of culture, because capital punishment is already ritual murder.� So capital punishment by stoning, as prescribed in Leviticus is the repetition of the original murder, re-enacted and with the participation of the whole community. And the law given back in the story of Cain’s crime is immediately followed up by the beginnings of civilization, with a description of the domestication of animals, the origins of music, and the origins of metallurgy with bronze and iron tools.

Another example they discuss is the Prometheus myth, about how Prometheus brought humans all the arts of civilization and was then made a sacrificial victim when Zeus chained him to a rock and sent an eagle to eat his liver every day.

They discuss Richard Dawkins and his theory of memes to describe a minimal unit of cultural transmission, though Girard says Dawkins has no awareness of mimetic rivalry.

Scapegoats can be chosen almost randomly—or they may become the victim when they recognize the innocence of other victims, or the arbitrariness of their scapegoating or the cultural inequities that the system is promoting. This is what happened to Socrates, when he spoke out against the inequities of the system. In Plato’s Republic, a character says that a truly just man will be accused of injustice and “be scourged, racked, bound, � and, at last, after suffering every kind of evil, he will be impaled.�

Girard points out such treatment and accusations against Job, as well as the servant of the Lord in Isaiah, and especially of Jesus, where Jesus is the clearest illustration of the scapegoat mechanism because of the way he speaks out against the establishment and on behalf of their injustice toward the oppressed and thereby flags himself as the a scapegoat to his persecutors. In John’s Gospel, when the high priest Caiaphas addresses the council, he tells them: “it is expedient for you that one man die for the people, and that the whole nation not perish.� And John says: “So from that day on they planned together to kill him.�

Girard sums up the significance of most cultures� ignorance of the scapegoat mechanism they relied upon: “In a nutshell: before the advent of Judaism and Christianity, in one way or the other, the scapegoat mechanism was accepted and justified, on the basis that it remained unknown. It brought peace back to the community at the height of the chaotic mimetic crisis. All archaic religions grounded their ritual precisely around the re-enactment of the founding murder. In other words, they considered the scapegoat to be guilty of the eruption of the mimetic crisis. By contrast, Christianity, in the figure of Jesus, denounced the scapegoat mechanism for what it actually is: the murder of an innocent victim, killed in order to pacify a riotous community. That’s the moment in which the mimetic mechanism is fully revealed.� [61]

He says: “I think that the unconscious nature of sacrificial violence is revealed in the New Testament, particularly in Luke: “‘Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing’� (Luke 23:34). And in Acts, also written by Luke, Peter later addresses the crowd who had been there for the crucifixion and says “You acted in ignorance� (Acts 3:17).

Ethologist Konrad Lorenz, in his observations of animal behavior, recognized prehuman dispositions that anticipate scapegoating. In his book On Aggression, he describes how, when two geese approach each other, they show signs of hostility, but most of the time the aggression is redirected and discharged against a third object, and Girard describes this as “a kind of incipient scapegoating mechanism, even if it isn’t proper to call it scapegoating since the third element often is an inanimate object.� But the couple quickly bonds over the mutual aggression toward a third party or object.

Similarly, Lorentz refers to human laughter as a form of redirected aggression, as when a group of people laugh at someone as a kind of gentle scapegoating, and we notice an empathic bond immediately developing within the group.

What human beings add, showing the large leap from lower animal culture to human culture, is the symbolic sphere, which Girard says is essential to the ritual re-enactment of the scapegoat mechanism. But how does this symbolic ability emerge? For Girard, symbolic ability and the scapegoat mechanism are tied together from the start. Chimpanzees carry out collective killings and eating of their victims, usually chosen from lower, monkey species. Girard theorizes that over hundreds of thousands of years, our hominid ancestors were involved in collective killings and experienced peace and solidarity as a result, leading them to want to repeat the event. The transition to symbolic ritual happened as they became capable of staging such a repetition, using a surrogate victim. But this required a larger brain—meaning that the need for a symbolic understanding of a symbolic substitute, a “scapegoat,� provided the necessary selective evolutionary pressure. [77]

Girard claims: “It is only with Christ that the mechanism is uncovered, and also today this discovery is not yet complete. Nobody is yet able to answer Christ’s question: “What is the meaning of that which is written: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone�? (Luke 20:17)�. If the scapegoat mechanism is our common cultural ‘ancestor,� ritual sacrifice is an intermediate step in the evolution of cultural forms, while social institutions are mature forms derived from this process.

He says that his “main evidence is ritualistic violence, even more than myths.� [120] Evidence of human sacrifice in earliest cultures comes to us from primitive societies in both the old and new worlds. Girard draws our attention to Phoenician culture, who anthropologists once argued, had no such actual practice except in certain ancient literature. “Since that time,� says Girard, “archeologists have discovered an entire cemetery of sacrificial victims close to Carthage [a Phoenician colony], where they exhumed half-burned infants mixed together with animals. [102]

I’d also note that we now have good archeological evidence for many ancient cultures around the world practicing human sacrifice, often of children, because of belief that the gods demanded what was most valuable. I’d note the Inca children recently discovered after being drugged on coca and buried alive near the summit of Llullaillaco, a dormant volcano where they were perfectly preserved by the cold, dry conditions. In life these children appear to have been children of rulers and nobles.

Near the end of the Joseph story in Genesis... - SEE PART 2 ]]> Review6715887653 Tue, 30 Jul 2024 17:40:12 -0700 <![CDATA[Fred added '"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character']]> /review/show/6715887653 "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" by Richard P. Feynman Fred gave 4 stars to "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character (Paperback) by Richard P. Feynman
]]> Review6715887480 Tue, 30 Jul 2024 17:40:04 -0700 <![CDATA[Fred added 'The Origin of Species']]> /review/show/6715887480 The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin Fred gave 5 stars to The Origin of Species (Hardcover) by Charles Darwin
]]> Review6715887035 Tue, 30 Jul 2024 17:39:46 -0700 <![CDATA[Fred added 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind']]> /review/show/6715887035 Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari Fred gave 3 stars to Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Paperback) by Yuval Noah Harari
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