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7/95 VIOLENCE
UNVEILED ?
This is a quick take (beware, quick is a relative
term) on the most provocative theory (except theism and the gospel) I have
ever encountered. It proposes
and convincingly shows—in a fuller exposition than this—the following,
among other things: 1. We
humans are mimetic (imitative) creatures to an extent that we have rarely
admitted; and that this is a key factor in our tendency to become violent.
2. Social
stratification, as in the caste system as it used to operate in India, or
an authoritarian, usually oppressive, social structure (such as the way
USSR controlled its own citizens and those of Eastern Europe), or the more
civil version we had more solidly in place here in the U.S. not so long
ago (with people “staying in their place”), is a principal means
cultures have used to suppress/contain violence. 3. Blood
sacrifice or some similar scapegoating mechanism is the principal means
human cultures have used since the “foundation of the world” to
eliminate the hostility/violence that builds up from time to time in human
culture and to restore the social cohesion that previously existed. It was also the founding event of virtually all human
cultures. 4. Christianity,
in a very real sense, is a major, though indirect cause of the increasing
levels of polarization, contentiousness, and violence in this country,
ex-Yugoslavia, and elsewhere in the world.
(But neither culpably nor in the obvious way it was responsible for
the violence of the crusades.) 5. Human
history and, consequently, literature are filled with evidence of these
things. 6. Aside
from the mechanisms cited in 2 and 3 above and their variants, only one
other viable choice is available to the human race.
The alternative to these three viable means is what we see
beginning to happen today. It
is tempting to see the increasing violence elsewhere in the world as a
false reading, a result of better reporting rather than any real increase
in the net level of violence. Even
if this is your take on violence elsewhere, I think it is obvious that the
increase here in the United States is real.
It is necessary only to remember what was considered the worst
behavior the “bad” kids did in the classroom in grade schools in the
50’s: chewing gum in class,
smoking in the bathroom, speaking rudely to the teacher, cursing the
teacher. A kid actually
striking the teacher was the worst I ever heard of in my school during
that time. My classes with
the worst discipline problems in my first 12 years of school (in public
school) would seem like examples of good discipline in many schools today.
The “bad” kids today are on drugs, carry guns or knives (or
both), kill teachers and other students.
They kill for sneakers, jackets, your car, right out on the street
in broad daylight. These
forms of behavior are not the norm, to be sure, but they were virtually
non-existent a mere 35 years ago.
No. 1. Mimesis - We learn by
example, young people, yea all of us, need good role models, Christians
are called to imitate Christ and the saints:
good mimesis. We’d
be in trouble without it. But
there is a dark side to our mimetic nature. There is a metaphor for sin (from Augustine) that
says that when we turn away from God (or just live “without” God),
there is a void in us that we try to fill with the “things of this
world,” (e.g., possessions, prestige, power).
It is really God we desire, but not knowing this, we mistakenly
transfer this desire to all manner of “things” that we don’t need.
In trying to fill the void this way, we are distracted from God,
and we hurt ourselves and others in the process—voila, sin. Since we don’t need these things (and therefore
have no innate desire for them), where does our desire, often actually
perceived as a felt need, come
from? The principal answer to
this lies in our mimetic nature. We
learn to desire them from seeing someone else desire them.
(The advertising industry would be only a pale shadow of what it is
today if this were not so.) When we want what someone else (our “model”) has
or is about to get, very soon our model becomes our rival for it.
When it is something on sale in a store it’s not usually a
serious matter. But when, for
instance, it is someone’s
spouse, a big promotion, power over people, or social status deemed as
critical to someone’s sense of worth as a person, it can get very
serious indeed, and can lead to violence.
Just concentrating on trying to fill the void can put us in
situations with a potential for developing into violence, without directly
involving mimesis, of course. Human violence itself is profoundly mimetic.
(In order to avoid complicating this issue with the issue of self
defense, consider here only situations that are not perceived as life
threatening.) It is very
difficult for a human being to not retaliate
in kind immediately after being
violently attacked—physically or verbally.
Can this be a deliberated action?
No, it is too immediate; there is no time to deliberate or even to
just decide. It is a reaction
coming out of our very nature. It
is mimesis, not revenge, when it happens immediately as it so often does.
Even over a longer time frame, actions taken in revenge are usually
modeled closely on the offending actions.
No. 2. Social stratification
- This is the larger
part of law and order, where a God-ordained or authoritarian
power-ordained social order exists, implicitly accepted (and enforced) by
those on all levels. This is
something like the Fire Marshal’s requirement:
in a multi-story building there must be steel doors at the
stairwells. If a fire starts
on one floor, this keeps it from spreading to the rest of the building.
Social stratification concedes a certain amount of potential
rivalry/conflict/violence, but substantially limits it.
This has special importance where there are large differences in
possessions, power, and prestige across the strata (a feature of many
human cultures). No. 3. Sacrifice
- We are all familiar
with the concept of uniting against a common enemy.
If we carefully consider our own observations of this and our
personal experience of it, I think it will be apparent that there is
something about our very nature that makes it such a powerful phenomenon. In this unity we are involved in something that can transcend the
tension and conflict that exist between us.
This produces an especially powerful effect when we are united in
violence against some enemy. This effect is also, of course, the intended result
of the scapegoat rituals mentioned the Bible:
to remove the sins of the community (chief among them, the
community’s internal conflict, since most sins are basically flawed
interpersonal relations) by placing them on a scapegoat and driving it out
of the community (often to die in the desert).
Human and animal sacrifices also had cleansing or atonement as
their express purpose and are structurally very similar to scapegoat
rituals. Virtually every ancient and many extant human cultures
have as the myth of their founding event some variation on the sacrificial
theme. What might have been the connecting event/process
between the cautious, untrusting, often conflicting family/tribes
scattered throughout some region in antiquity and, a short while later in
that same region, the nation composed of most of them, now united as one
community? What, indeed, that
might be cleaned up in such a way as to come out as one of the typical
creation myths “explaining” the founding of the culture?
It seems obvious that it would take a unifying force that could
overcome their suspicion and conflict, that they ganged up on someone or
some group, and that there was a violent catharsis involved. Creation myths typically involve the monster (or a
god) being killed and dismembered (or “falling asleep” or dying) and
the world, the people, or some other critical element being formed from
the parts (or growing out of the corpse). These could well be the
sanitized version of the founding murder or war, told in such a way as to
not encourage any repeating of the violence involved in it.
In effect, the violence is told by the myth as good violence,
sacred violence, having triumphed over bad violence, profane violence of
some sort. For it to be good,
sacred violence, the voice of the victim must be silenced in order to
achieve unanimity against the enemy/victim.
In an effort to sustain the camaraderie achieved, the founding
event is recreated via the ritual and remembered via the myth.
This seems to be the essence of primitive religion. Scapegoating on a smaller scale is ubiquitous in our
own and most other cultures today as things heat up and get increasingly
uncomfortable. We don’t
recognize this because it is human nature and not a conscious or
deliberate thing. It comes
naturally to us to attempt to restore “order” by scapegoating.
No. 4. Christianity as a major cause of escalating
violence - To the admittedly limited extent that the gospel has taken
hold in human culture, the violence-limiting mechanisms in 2. and 3. above
are losing their effectiveness. Christians
are called to be unprejudiced, so social stratification is harder to pull
off. They are called to love
their enemies, to do good for them, not to gang up on them, to endure the
sting of evil without reciprocating.
With Jesus as the consummate victim, it is getting harder to
mythologize the scapegoating violence sufficiently to conceal the
victim’s voice. We are more and more for the underdog no matter the
circumstances. The only ones
we can comfortably scapegoat are virtually always those who are
victimizers. No. 5. History and Literature are filled with
evidence - These things have been largely hidden from view because they
are so embedded in culture or human nature that they are virtually
invisible to those living within the culture of which they are the fabric.
Because of this invisibility, we have not consciously understood
them and therefore don’t generally recognize them when we see them
operating in other cultures.
Even when we do, we are likely to still not see their direct analog
in our own culture, and therefore don’t fully understand them.
A very few examples: The conversation between Hap and Biff early in
Death of a Salesman when they
return from “a night out with the ladies” Ulysses’ speech on “degree” in Act I,
Scene III of Shakespeare’s Troilus
and Cressida Mrs. Turpin’s going-to-sleep routine --
her musings about the local social order and the dream that usually
follows—in Flannery O’Conner’s short story Revelation Newspaper accounts of public “canings” in
Singapore that appeared soon after a young American boy was sentenced to a
caning there. These accounts
described the spectators, not in the kind of disquieting awe that might be
expected as the brutal, bloody, obviously very painful, beating is The very comfortable social solidarity that
followed the “good wars” we’ve fought (e.g., WWI, WWII) and the
quite opposite feelings we had after The Vietnam war.
(Fighting in the streets here
was one of the results of this war because we couldn’t get anything like
unanimity on it.) No. 6. The only other viable alternative
- It is, of course,
the kingdom of God: a
community or communities of humility, compassion, forgiveness, and service
to others. It is where words
and actions are (among other things) healing not hurting and uniting not
dividing. We are at a point in human history where we find
ourselves in a race between the consequences of Christianity’s effect on
the “conventional” means for preventing/controlling violence on the
one hand, and Christianity’s solution to the problem of violence on the
other. Never has the call to
“work for the kingdom” been any more urgent, and for the very survival
of the human race as well as for personal salvation.
I hasten to add that these theories are not mine,
only their awkward presentation here.
They are primarily the work of, and were distilled from life and
literature by, René Girard, Gil Bailie, and St. Augustine.
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