René Girard’s Mimetic Theory | If there is a revival of religious belief among intellectuals and other prominent figures in our culture, perhaps René Girard's conversion in the 60s...

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René Girard’s Mimetic Theory

George Dunn
 
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 July 2 at 9:00 PM Shared with Public group
If there is a revival of religious belief among intellectuals and other prominent figures in our culture, perhaps René Girard's conversion in the 60s (described by Cynthia Haven in her book The Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard) was an early bellwether.
Girard gets only a passing mention in this piece as an influence on Peter Thiel, however. The focus is on figures like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Niall Ferguson, and Paul Kingsnorth, whose conversions were spurred in part by their disenchantment with the modern world and the spiritual vacuity of a civilization that has increasingly come to treat Christianity as disreputable.
“There is no society without religion because without religion society cannot exist,” wrote René Girard in Violence and the Sacred. Arguably, secular modernity is also a religion of sorts, centered on the worship of progress, the technological conquest of nature, and the emancipation of human desire from all of those restraints that were once regarded as sacred but are now seen as arbitrary. If so, those profiled in this article are not so much rediscovering religion as trading a soul-crushing religion for what we may hope will be a life-giving one.
Of course, some might argue that these new converts (or at least some of them) have an inadequate or flawed understanding of Christianity. That might be true. On the other hand, our initial grasp of any subject is bound to be imperfect. We always begin in error, but with persistence and a lot of luck, we may inch toward a better understanding.
In short, the point isn’t that these new converts get everything right, but that they may have entered a path that could lead them closer to the truth. Just as Girard argues that exposure to the Christian gospel across millennia helped to inculcate a concern for victims and gradually humanized Western civilization, so too these new converts to Christianity now drink from a well that we might hope will transform them in positive ways.
There’s another echo of Girard in this piece, one that students of mimetic theory may notice even though Girard isn’t named. In explaining what prompted his conversion, Paul Kingsnorth attributes it to something other than a rational choice. “If you ever meet a holy person,” he says, “you look at them and you think, Wow, that’s really something—you know, I would love to be like that. How does that happen?” What is this reaction if not good mimesis, the desire to be like the other, but in a way that precludes all rivalry?
One more observation: The article states that Nietzsche “saw religion as little more than a ‘slave morality’—a crutch for the weak and cowardly.” That’s not true. Christianity may have been born of slave morality, but there are other forms of religion. He praised ancient Greek religion for “the unrestrained fullness of gratitude that streams out of it,” which is just the opposite of the resentement of slave morality. Religion was good for more than consoling sufferers.
Nietzsche believed that human beings possessed—not a “God-shaped hole,” an idea associated with Blaise Pascal—but a “god-forming instinct,” a drive to create a sense of meaning and purpose that is often personified as gods. He would agree that there can be no healthy society without religion.
Nietzsche hoped to resurrect the god Dionysus for the modern age, though he interpreted that god very differently than did Girard. For Nietzsche, Dionysus embodied gratitude for existence even in the throes of cruel affliction, in contrast to what he took to be the Christian view of suffering, namely, that it constitutes an objection to mortal existence and an incentive to seek escape in another world.
Of course, not everyone interprets Christianity this way. According to Simone Weil, “The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.” But judging whether that’s how the subjects of this article view Christianity is way beyond my ken.
How Intellectuals Found God
thefp.com
How Intellectuals Found God
Almost 150 years after Nietzsche said ‘God is dead,’ some of our most important thinkers are getting religion. Peter Savodnik meets the new theists.
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Mike Drippe Sr.
This book shows another way in which Christianity transformed society for the better:
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