The Righteously Mimetic Mind

In The Righteously Mimetic Mind, author Luca Luchesini explores additional intersections between the work of Jonathan Haidt, from view of the Prospecting Lens, and Rene Girard, from the view of the Mimetic Lens.  We will be focusing on the areas not covered by the previous blog entry, which you may wish to reference.

One the questions about WEIRD (Western) societies that was not discussed in the last post was whether and how WEIRD societies still incorporate the Mimetic Lens's archaic sacred model of sacrifice and scapegoating.

Luchesini focuses in part on how both Haidt and Girard rely to an extent on the work of Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern sociology and anthropology.  As a short-hand analogy, Haidt contends that humans behave as if they were 90% chimpanzee, or individualist thinkers, and 10% bee, or collectivist thinkers -- that is, selfish beings striving to belong to a bigger and nobler entity.  "People reach ecstasy when they are able to transition to the feeling of “being part of a whole”. . . . Haidt identifies three ways by which people can reach this state: awe in nature, drugs, and social raves (e.g. sports, musical, religious and political rallies of any sort). Again, Haidt tries to bring experimental evidence or at least exhibits to our nature, and he mentions the research around mirror neurons and oxytocin."

Luchesini connects Haidt with Girard through the work of Elias Canetti, who won a Nobel Prize in Literature and also wrote Crowds and Power about the psychology of crowds.  Canetti's thesis was that people join crowds "because they provide an antidote, albeit temporary, to the typical human trend of differentiation and take people back to a state where they are equal to each other and without any bound."  As Luchesini describes:

Canetti observes that to start a crowd it is necessary to have a smaller group of people that can identify themselves with a goal and act as a catalyst for the bigger crowd to form, if the right environmental conditions arise. This catalyst is called the "crowd crystal" and is indeed the first structure that for Canetti appeared in primitive groups in the form of the pack.

Based on the anthropological studies available in the 1950s, Canetti identifies four types of pack: the hunting pack, the war pack, the lamenting pack and the increase pack. These packs can mutually transform into each other. The hunting pack and its hierarchy are similar to those of the animal world. It is only with mankind however that the war, increase and lamenting pack appear for the first time. While hunting packs are directed at animals animals and driven mainly by the need to procure food, war packs are directed exclusively at other rival human groups and can be triggered also by futile grounds of provocation.

Hegel would say that these are the first distinctive human actions, and Haidt would probably agree that packs have been the first new social structures enabled by shared intentionality. The hierarchy tasks evolve as well: the human leader must manage very precisely the booty allocation between pack members. Unlike in animals where after the hunt hierarchy translates simply in the respect of a fixed pecking order, hierarchies in people are always at risk of being challenged by the relentless action of desire and envy. The booty obtained in hunt and war helps also transforming the war pack into an increase pack, that is to say a group of people defined by some kind of ritual whose goal is the increase of the amount of cattle, food, slaves or any other good needed by the community.

No matter how victorious, some members of the community perished in action, and then the lamenting pack fulfills the double goal of at once re-asserting the unity of the survivors in their grief for the dead and establishing the mirror crowd of the dead to whom the perished members of the community are handed over. Of course, a pack lamenting the dead in battle can turn into a war pack and so on. Canetti also sees the birth of the lamenting pack as a way to discharge the psychological strain that the pain of the victims of the war/ hunting pack creates, a kind of purification ritual for the winners. The lamenting pack is also the ground upon which every religion is built, and Canetti provides many examples of rituals that have survived to this day both in Christianity and Islam.

According to Canetti the variety of forms that power has taken in human history with all its associated institutions, symbols and rituals ultimately rely on the core violence of the predator-prey relationship. Canetti identifies three founding elements of power: the Survivor who rules via Commands and establishes links between things with Transformations or metamorphosis. The predator-prey relationship is experienced by people in the various forms of the hunting and warring packs that give birth to the figure of the Survivor. The Survivor is the one that came back alive and victorious from the hunt or the war, thereby establishing its power not only on the dead enemies but also on the dead friends.

The more the dead in the battle, the more power is granted to the Survivor and the more his community is guaranteed to benefit from his leadership in increasing its rule among the neighboring groups. It is the Survivor who oversees how to split the loot among the pack: it is up to him to define who gets what, always following a very precise ritual that mimics the one used by the religious leader in managing the religious sacrifice.

However, the paradox that arises is devilish: to cement his power, the Survivor needs to increase the crowd of the dead, and while the primary and explicit targets are indeed the enemies of the opposing crowds, there will be more and more casualties also among his own community. The harsh reality is that the Survivor power benefits from both types of death while the community at some point in time will see the cost-benefit balance enter into a crisis that can find a solution only in the the self-destruction of the community or in the ousting of the ruler.

When it comes to command, Canetti makes the crucial observation that command precedes language and is founded in the pre-human and cross-species interaction of the flight command, to which any prey obeys as soon as the presence or even the suspect of presence of the predator is detected. Canetti traces all subsequent evolutions of command to the threat of death. What is mankind adding to this basic interaction? In people, every command creates a feedback sting in those that receive it, a resentment to retaliate and transfer the very same command to someone else at a later date. It does not really matter how and when the transfer happens, neither if we can transfer back to those who gave us the initial command. The key point is to have the possibility to offload this reminder that eventually relies on a threat of punishment and a more or less explicit reminder of death.  How to cure it? It is either the promise of a promotion (transform from slave and potential victim/ prey to master and predator) or the discharge in a reversal crowd at the expense of the Survivor or in a broader sense the ruling class.

Luchesni then goes on to consider Girard's mimetic theory.  He agrees with my previous blog entry that the Mimetic Lens accurately describes the genesis of WEIRD societies and their moral basis in Christianity.

Then he discusses the interesting phenomenon that Haidt also observed, which is that over time, most Western churches dropped many of their "sacred" rituals in favor of teaching that the scapegoats of society are innocent victims, and the religious idea of "sacred" was transposed into the secular concept of "scarcity." Scarcity is the modern substitute for "sacred" and reflects the modern trend towards deifying markets and consumerism. 

So, not recognizing the mimetic origin of desire, modernity found universal scarcity as the sole possible explanation. We all crave for someone else’s things, and we observe that in the long run (and even with increased income) the situation does not improve. If we still do not recognize the mechanism of desire, the obvious conclusion is that there are not enough resources to make us all happy.

The most efficient management of scarcity, as economic theory and the history of the West show, requires the setup of a market regulated by prices for resources to be optimally allocated, a legal system to transfer property rights of goods and a State empowered to enforce all this on a reasonably large area. Sacred and scarcity are just two different and mutually exclusive mimetic modes that people have found to deal with the the unpleasant effects of mimetic desire.

Sacred applies to traditional societies where violence is contained (in the sense of limited) in terms of prohibitions and rituals and it contains (in the sense of using) violence in the sacrifice of the scapegoat. Scarcity appears in WEIRD societies that reject sacrifice as mechanism of regulation and limit violence by privatizing conflicts and removing sacred ties between the vast majority of their members.

Thus, secular Western institutions are built around the sacredness of scarcity.  Like the violence in the archaic sacred model, a form of violence is permitted in the nature of economic competition that cleanses and purges unproductive or unlucky scapegoats.  The entire Western economic system comprises an archaic sacred model that depends upon a fundamental belief that scarcity is a sacrosanct concept.

This is felt most acutely in the consumerist quest for "scarce" objects and experiences.  An object or experience is imbued with a sacred quality when it is deemed to be "scarce".  Any number of historical asset bubbles involving tulips, shares of stock, houses and beanie babies bears this out.  The attractiveness of vacations is enhanced by an air of exclusivity or exotic nature.  If too many people are allowed to participate, the object or experience declines in sacred value.

As an aside, this is also what animates the marketing and advertising industry -- to imbue designated objects or experiences with a scarce or sacred quality that makes them desirable.  In effect, they perform a secular priestly function. 

Luchesini notes a certain irony in this that although we in WEIRD societies would appear to understand the effects of mimetic desire when thinking about human relations, we go on coming up with theories in the public sphere that reflect a misunderstanding of what is going on: 

The irony in this process is that the mimetic nature of desire remains largely misunderstood, at least to the large majority of people and this happens despite that many of the bards of the modern nations, from Dante to Shakespeare and Cervantes, have instead developed a very precise and accurate theory of mimetic desire in their literary works. The establishment of modernity on a base that still leaves hidden or misunderstood the true nature of human desire has also had detrimental effects on all the doctrines that tried to diagnose and overcome its illnesses.

From a mimetic perspective, Marxism simply chose to take the world back to the era of the sacred solidarity, failing to understand that the main problem of modernity was not the wrong allocation of the means of production or excessive amount of religious opium in the air, but that simply after 2000 years of Christianity it was impossible to really believe in the value of sacrifice, even if they were carried out on a collective scale exterminating peasants and bourgeois by the millions. In other words, Marxism did not realize that not all religions were opium, and rather there was one tradition that albeit with varying degrees of success was curing people from the sacrificial hangover. "Property is sacred" has been one of the foundation of the modern world, and Marx thought that the sacred was a relic on the way of a quick dismissal and focused his attention on the fight to overcome property. He should have done the opposite.

On the other hand, Freudism started from the intuition that it was more of an inner problem of man that needed attention before moving to change the social organization. The core finding of Freudism, the Oedipus complex, correctly identified that there were three elements in the human problem but somehow it restricted the area to sexuality and parental relations. In “Violence and the Sacred” Girard shows how Freud went so close to capturing the real nature of desire with the Oedipus and the origin of myths and rituals in “Totem and Taboos” but somehow fell prey to the Romantic belief that there is nothing between myself and my desired object.

In sum, WEIRD societies have invested Market and State as the key structures to contain the dynamic of unconfined escalation. Over the course of the Modern era, State has become more totalitarian in the sense that it extended well beyond the initial scope of the “night watch state” to the oversized dimension of the welfare state-society. Markets have become increasingly efficient and global, with the biggest companies able to rival with States in terms of power and influence. Both have initiated a rush to increase indefinitely their size, power, reach and relevance in individual lives and claim to represent the ultimate achievement of history. This giant escalation led ultimately to the World Wars of last century and recurring economic shocks of ever greater magnitude that four centuries after the European wars of religion left the founding structures of modernity alive but somehow delegitimized. According to Girard we are therefore living in an ambiguous world that, while undoubtedly growing more aware and better at saving victims in increasing numbers, it counterbalances this trend with the relentless destruction of the traditional brakes to the escalation of violence and the increased power and availability of the means of destruction.

Neither Luchesini nor I are the first to recognize that adherence to  economic dogmas is tantamount to a religious faith in something sacred, and concomitant sacrificing is regularly performed in the form of direct government coercion or government sanctioned competitions depending on whether the theory is based in socialist or capitalist notions of rectitude.  Those who fail to conform with the norms of such theories are frequently singled out as scapegoats "deserving" of some form of punishment or degradation.  A mere refusal to accept the dogma is often enough to place one in the category of a potential scapegoat.

Of course, it all done in the name of a victim or victims in WEIRD societies, as discussed in the prior post.  Tellingly, both pro-socialist and pro-capitalist literature often involve plot lines that are mimetic twins with opposing victims.  Thus, in Upton Sinclair's pro-socialist work,  The Jungle, the virtuous protagonist immigrant workers are corrupted by the capitalist system, but find salvation in the end when they attend socialist meetings and experience a form of catharsis with a like-minded crowd.  In Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, the capitalist protagonists are corrupted by a socialist system and then find salvation in a capitalist utopia and experience catharsis with a like-minded crowd.   These plots are essentially retreads of the Christian conversion stories that begin with St. Paul.

Having established victimhood, and therefore righteousness in new sacred secular doctrines, the protagonists in each novel go forth to vindicate their beliefs by attacking designated scapegoat adversaries represented by the capitalists in The Jungle and the socialists in Atlas Shrugged.  But note that the scapegoats in the books would never be identified as scapegoats by the authors or protagonists, because to the participant in an archaic sacred system, the scapegoats are always anathema to society, are guilty of something and must be neutralized and eliminated.

Inspected under the Mimetic Lens both of these novels show the interplay and intermingling of both the archaic sacred model of society and the innocent victim model.  As Girard often said and Luchesini duly noted above, after 2000 years this process remains incomplete and continues to involve opposing mimetic structures and alternate cycles of actually saving victims and committing violence against mimetic rivals in the name of victims.