Transcript of Girard Lecture VI | The Triumph of Modernity

0. Introduction

David Perell: So far, we’ve only discussed René Girard’s understanding of history. But in this lecture, we’re going to leap forward and examine the present. For me, this was the crescendo that we’ve been building towards for the past five lectures.

We’re going to see how all of the Girardian concepts that we’ve come to understand together, such as mimesis, metaphysical desire, resentment, scapegoating, how all of those things manifest in our world as it is today. The same forces that drove conflict in old stories like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and historical events like the Trojan War, they still animate the world today.

Girard’s theory puts words to what the biologist E.O. Wilson once said, and I quote:

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.

And we’ve made great strides in our technological capacities, our institutional design and even our rational understanding of the world. But still, the stubbornness of human nature refuses to budge.

And with that tension in mind, let’s dive into Girard’s understanding of modernity.

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Johnathan Bi: Two lectures ago, we began detailing our past – pagan religion and society. Last lecture, we discussed the rupture – Christianity. In this lecture, we’re going to discuss the present – modernity. And in the next, we’re going to discuss the near future – imminent apocalypse.

It should be evident, hopefully, from our last lecture that the values of Christianity – love and truth – are not just different, but diametrically opposed to the foundations of pagan and indeed all of human society, which are violence and deceit. Rupture, then, is really not an exaggeration to describe Christianity. How will human society digest such an incompatible and threatening substance? What trajectory has history been set on with this foreign injection? These are the questions that I hope to answer in these last two lectures.

Christianity unleashes four powerful forces within human history, three magnificent and one less so, in fact, one is apocalyptic: love, truth, innovation and violence.

In this lecture on modernity then, we will be analyzing the cause and consequences of the three good forces. And in the final lecture on apocalypse, we will examine the fourth and final force of violence. The split between these two lectures are temporal – one is about the present and the other is about the near future. But I also encourage you to understand the split between these two lectures as both examining modernity but from radically different lenses. This lecture will examine current society as if it already were the kingdom of God. The next lecture will examine current society as if it were still a pagan society.

In the next lecture, by examining our current society as if it were still a pagan society – needing scapegoats and myths and lies and deceit – we’re going to understand how the Christian message has fundamentally altered mechanisms of violence. And in this lecture, by examining our current society as if it were already the kingdom of God, as actualizing love and truth, we can understand where we have made genuine progress and where our fallen human nature refuses to budge.

But before we delve into these three forces, let me give you an idea of the trajectory of history that the Christian rupture has set us on.

1. Modernity as Rupture

Johnathan Bi: For millennia, human society operated on a cyclical time, whose cycles were demarcated by founding murders. Societies would first descend into chaos — this was the mimetic contagion. A scapegoat would be arbitrarily chosen to inherit all the blame and be expelled, often meaning killed. And this founding murder would bring back a peace so miraculous that people attributed the saving force to the victim, the now dead victim, deifying it paradoxically. Of course, both the scapegoating and the deification are equally deceitful. The victim neither had the power to cause or end the chaos – it’s all a psychological projection by the crowd, grounded on nothing but unanimity. Myths then, would be created out of this real foundational event and out of these myths spawned core institutions of pagan societies: prohibitions prevented violence, and rituals acted as a release valve for violence. But as any ideology or worldly order, these myths alongside their institutions would start to lose their prestige over time. The moral paradigm would lose its force and a society descended again into chaos, this whole process had to begin anew: chaos, founding murder, deification, myth-making, ad infinitum.

This four-fold process is called “The Scapegoat Mechanism” and for Girard was deeply, deeply ambivalent. It’s a combination of both ultimate evil and worldly good. Sacrifice one for all, limit freedom of the parts for the stability of the whole and use violence and lies to establish worldly order. But the good thing about it is, you only need to kill one innocent man to save the entire community.

What is required for the functioning of the scapegoat mechanism was that its mechanisms had to remain hidden. Because sacredity and pagan power, as we discussed, are predicated and based on a deceitful unanimity, the victim’s innocence must remain hidden, lest the whole arbitrariness be exposed and the entire edifice come crumbling down. For pagan religions to work, the crowd must not know that the source of power of their god actually comes from the psychological projections of the crowd.

This is where Christ comes in. Christ, through the crucifixion, showed precisely the innocence of the victim, the guilt and the projection of the crowd and gave us a moral paradigm through which we can expose, decode and free ourselves from religion altogether. The Christian revelation for Girard becomes the rupture point of human history. Slowly but surely, humanity loses its ability to create myth out of these deified scapegoats. And with it, the legitimacy of prohibitions—now considered oppressive—and the efficacy of sacrifice—now considered cruel—also began to deteriorate.

But remember, this is not an unqualified good thing. If violence and lies properly directed are the foundations of worldly order, then love and truth can only bring about worldly chaos. And so we might say, in a very reductive fashion, that the scapegoat mechanism is a worldly good but an ultimate evil, whereas Christ and Christ’s revelation is ultimately good but brings forth worldly chaos. Girard reminds us that Christ himself tells us as much. I quote to you Matthew 10:34:

Think not that I came to send peace on earth. I came not to send peace, but a sword.

Christ pulls the cultural rug underneath our feet and takes humanity from cyclical time to a linear time.