Speculating on the willing victim withdrawing from violence and the ideology of non-violent resistance
René Girard,
French-American scholar of literature and religion, died in 2015.
René
Girard built his reputation on a sweeping theory of human behaviour that traced
the roots of desire violence, and religion to a single source: imitation. We
don’t desire objects because of their intrinsic value, he argued- we want them
because others want them. Desire is memetic: we imitate what others fund
desirable, especially those we admire….But, what happens when the person we
imitate is close enough to us to become a rival? When two people covet the same
scarce good- status, love, land, attention- they turn on each other. Dr. Girard
called this memetic rivalry. Its most famous expression is the love triangle,
but it also plays out in office politics, athletic competition, Wall Street
hysteria, and the endless quest to keep up with the Joneses. This insight leads
to a darker one; human beings don’t fight because they’re different, but
because they’re alike, locked in rivalry over the same thing. Ancient
societies, Dr. Girard believed, were haunted by this tendency. To stave off
chaos. They developed the scapegoat mechanism; projecting blame onto a single
individual or group, then purging them through expulsion or sacrifice. It’s a
primal pattern that persists in pogroms, witch trials, and, more recently,
cancel culture and internet mobs.
Dr.
Girard’s other great insight concerns religion. Far from being the cause of
violence, religion, he argued as a means of containing it. Sacrificial rituals
diffused mimetic tensions. These tensions held – until biblical religion began
unravelling them from within. Scripture, Dr. Girard noted, repeatedly, sides
with the victim: Joseph betrayed his brothers, the Suffering Servant in Isaiah,
and most of all, the crucified Christ. As Christianity spread, it undermined
the scapegoat mechanism and implanted a new moral reflex: concern for victims.
But this
moral breakthrough came with a paradox. Once victimhood conferred moral
authority, people began to compete for it. Mimetic desire now played out as a
race to be more oppressed, more offended, more righteous in defence of others.
A new rivalry was born—this time over who suffers most. Dr. Girard, on the
other hand, urged us to renounce rivalry and practise forgiveness. (How an obscure scholar is shaping
the most powerful country on Earth, by George A. Dunn, Special to the Globe and
Mail, July 3, 2025)
Peter Thiel,
as a student at Stanford when Girard taught there has become a frenzied apostle
of Girard’s and, adapting the mimetic theory to the internet, such as Facebook,
where everyone ‘wants to imitate’ what everyone else has, has poured millions
into internet investments. And that has fueled his political funding of the
Vice-president, and other ‘like-minded’ (or equally dependent aspiring
politicians). There is real danger in the application of Girard’s serious
theory to the machinations of a digital and especially an artificial-intelligence-saturated
internet.
No theory
can be tilted so far as to be either all ‘utopian’ or all ‘dystopian’….and Jay
Alison in his book, The Joy of Being Wrong, has cast a very different
interpretation and application of the Girard memetic theory to theology.
If I am
reading Alison (and Girard) reasonably appropriately, then, the violence of the
society that without cause or justification crucifies Jesus on Calvary, and especially
the blindness to its evil and nefariousness, especially when set in concert
with the willing victim, can carry a model of imitation that moves beyond
rivalry and violence and into compassion and forgiveness, and thereby into
relationality. Rather than competing for the highest rung of victimhood,
martyrdom, and a perverse iteration of the hero, especially the alpha male
hero, the withdrawal from unjust, illegitimate violence, even if and when such
a withdrawal might smack to the outside world as ‘weakness, spinelessness, excessive
fear, and a perverse search for and ambition to heroism, is and can be a model
of the willing victim of the Crucifixion.
The mystery
of this apparent paradox continues. It is not necessarily a rational, even
consciousness and conscientious and deliberate decision to withdraw. Sometimes it
might be as simple as a child withdrawing from a voice or a look that, for that
child, embodies what s/he ‘knows’ as dangerous, threatening, intimidating and
unfair….even if all of those words are unfamiliar to that child. At the ‘other
end’ of such a withdrawal from violence, as an imitation of the willing,
relational victim of Calvary, we might consider Nelson Mandela, who rejected
violence in favour of peaceful, yet forceful, resistance, (inspired and even
modelled by Gandhi). Only after years of unsuccessful legal, public, physical
and verbal argument, protests, and non-violent resistances of various forms did
Mandela finally relent and accede to some his more impatient compatriots, submit
to military (militia) training, and succumb to his aversion for violence.
From
Britannica.com, we read:
Satyagraha, concept introduced in the early 20th
century by Mahatma Gandhi to designate a determined but nonviolent resistance to
evil. Gandhi’s satyagraha became a major too in the Indian struggle
against British imperialism and has since been adopted by protest groups in
other countries. According to this philosophy, satyagrahis—practitioners of
satyagraha—achieve correct insight into the real nature of an evil situation by
observing a nonviolence of the mind, by seeking truth in a spirit of peace and love
and by undergoing a rigorous process of self-scrutiny. In so doing, the
satyagrahi encounters truth in the absolute. By refusing to submit to the wrong
or to cooperate with it in any way, the satyagrahi asserts that truth.
Throughout the confrontation with evil, the satyagrahi must adhere to nonviolence,
for to employ violence would be to lose correct insight. Satyagrahis always
warn their opponents of their intentions; satyagraha forbids any tactic
suggesting the use of secrecy to one’s advantage. Satyagraha includes more than
civil disobedience. Its full range of application extends from the details of
correct daily living to the construction of alternative political and economic
institutions. Satyagraha seeks to conquer through conversion: in the end there
is neither defeat nor victory but rather a new harmony.
This is not
an argument to identify Alison’s willing victim who withdraws from unjust violence
(the Jesus figure of the Crucifixion) as identical to the Satyagrahi of Gandhi
or vice versa. It is, however, a seemingly inescapable and compelling connecting
of the dots that link (at least by analogy, comparison, implication and praxis)
the two images. And while we in the West seem, at least on the surface and in
both rhetoric and attitude of our better angels, to revere men such as Mandela
and Gandhi, for their accomplishments, and while Satyagraha is considered, in
the eWest, a ‘philosophy’ rather than a religion, not a discipleship to and emulation
and imitation of a willing victim to unjust violence (on which the world seems unduly
dependent, if not actually obsessed with, consumed by, and even perhaps addicted
to) the discernment between a philosophy and a religious principle and image
may be a search for a difference where little, if any, really exists.
What jumps
out from these thoughts, linking Gerard, Alison, Mandela, Gandhi, and whomever
else might be lurking in the shadows of these words and sentences, is a cosmos
of theological and historic and philosophic
images, incarnations, disciplines and ideals to which, for which and in which
humans might find meaning, purpose, direction and both relief and some contentment.
Of course,
suffering, the sine qua non of all foundational premises of both theology and philosophy,
is never absent from any attempt to live a full life as a human being. And, God
is not reducible to a single image, nor a single principle, irrespective of
which name and identity each God is imaged. Individual human choices,
especially when confronting the most extreme moments, (Hillman’s in extremis)
matter to both the person facing the choice, and, it says here
unapologetically) that it also matters to the universe. It is not enough to repeat,
as does that man throwing the clam back into the sea, when asked why, ‘Well, it
matters to that one clam!” It is not only each clam tossed back into its
habitat, but each human choosing his or her habitat, where life can flourish.
And life flourishing is an image irreducible to the literal, the empirical, the
scientific.
Life-flourishing
is, to borrow and mix metaphors, analogous to the salmon swimming upstream to
spawn, to flourish, to propagate. It is confronting the rushing white water in
the face, joyously, vigorously, courageously and unrelentingly, as if impelled
by an instinct to and for life that will not be either sedated or denied or
avoided.
And,
whether such an instinct of the willing victim submitting to unjust violence,
or the satyagrahi embracing the discipline of his highest instincts and ideals,
or some other ‘path’ to resisting the over-wheening, unjustified, illegitimate and
tragic obsession with, addiction to, violence, in whatever of its many faces and
forms, it seems that we have intellectual, political, as well as deeply
spiritual models from which to glean inspiration, motivation, discipline and
hope.
We know
that there is a kernel of both truth and wisdom in much of the legacy of each
of these mentors. How we curate, interpret, espouse and apply their gifts
remains an individual enterprise, not in order to achieve some heroic status,
but almost perhaps the inverse, given that the world is highly unlikely to shed
its dependence on violence, especially illegitimate and unjust violence.