VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, [2] ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 02:11:55 02/17/08 Sun
Author: Hwaet!
Subject: Disputing Girard's Vision of the Apocalypse

In Things Hidden Bk1, Ch 5, “Persecution Texts,” Girard deftly leads up to projecting nothing short of an apocalyptical conclusion for humanity, an apocalypse to be realized when all mankind becomes conscious of the scapegoat mechanism and violently implodes on itself. The only way to prevent such an apocalypse would be to stop the expansion of knowledge of the scapegoat mechanism (which Girard says is impossible), or for mankind to cease from violence—not in pursuit of a peaceful, 19th-Century utopia, but merely to keep from destroying itself. As Girard says, “The definitive renunciation of violence, without any second thoughts, will become for us the condition sine non qua for the survival of humanity itself and for each one of us” (137). G.L. follows up, “If man acts as he has in the past and abandons himself to mimetic contagion, there will be no victimage mechanisms to save him.”

While this apocalyptic scenario nicely sets up Girard’s transition into laying out humanity’s only escape from violent self-destruction, found in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, I dispute that worldwide consciousness of the scapegoat mechanism must lead to the point at which “there will be no victimage mechanisms to save him.” Instead, in the event of an apocalypse, one exempt from divine intervention and caused by global or nearly global consciousness of the scapegoat mechanism, humanity would temporarily erupt in mimetic contagion before unconsciously reintroducing the mechanism it believes itself to have escaped.

I still hold that for the mechanism to be an effective, unifying cause for peace, the community must not be conscious of it. Now that we smart folks know about the mechanism, we lose the communal benefit of the scapegoat. Partially offsetting this loss, we gain personally and morally from the knowledge that we should stop blaming arbitrary victims. But the aggregate personal gain will not sufficiently counteract a burgeoning mimetic crisis. I will agree with Girard that the violence that will ensue from consciousness of the mechanism will be “undoubtedly more destructive” than the violence that the unconscious ritual held in check; I disagree with Girard in that I think this “more destructive” violence will be temporary (Violence 137). Certainly, with no communal scapegoat to unite the political body, each man will take matters into his own hands as a vigilante. We will continue to scapegoat, but killing our personal victims will not stop the blood bath, so we will not deify them. But is it not conceivable that we would grow so violent that we eventually blame somebody, somewhere, collectively? In other words, is it possible that things will get so bad when the cultures of the world finally realize the scapegoat mechanism (making it useless), that we will unconsciously reintroduce the mechanism?

One will object that there would be no time or means amidst killing one another to stop and blame someone collectively. That is not true. Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, Locke, and our own experience tell us that mankind can and will form communities out of chaos. Aristotle argues in his Politics 1.2 that "man is by nature a political animal" and that the polis "comes into being for the sake of living, and it exists for the sake of living well." Cicero’s Institutiones explains that civilization is born from men using rhetoric to persuade one another out of chaos and into community. Hobbes’s Leviathan says that men will form communities as an alternative to being killed, while Locke’s Second Treatise says that men will join to protect their rights. Regardless of whether the reader believes in an initial, chaotic “state of nature,” the arguments of Hobbes and Locke certainly apply to Girard’s apocalyptic scenario, which is exactly the same as Hobbes's and Locke's chaotic “state of nature,” except that Girard’s chaos comes at end of civilization, while Hobbes’s and Locke’s chaos precedes civilization. Indeed, contrary to what Girard says in Things Hidden Bk1, Ch5, there is every reason to think that Girard’s chaos will come both at the end of one civilization AND, as in Hobbes and Locke, at the beginning of another civilization. There is no reason to suspect that if chaos strikes again, men will not eventually persuade each other, form pacts, and establish rights. My point is not that classical and neoclassical thinkers had a better idea about the origins of civilization than Girard, but that man will form civilization from chaos. These thinkers argue that man (Girard would add, even enlightened, conscious man), is going to want to stop the violence. Girard agrees, and says that a communal scapegoat is necessary to do it. But while Girard says that global consciousness of the scapegoat mechanism will mean the end of the victimage required to stop the mimetic crisis, I object that it is inconceivable that six billion vigilantes (or whatever majority would be sufficient to wipe out civilization) would not, after only a brief period of "undoubtedly more destructible" violence, organize themselves against someone (probably innocent) whom they hold responsible for the madness, unconscious that they are scapegoating that someone. They will reintroduce the mechanism, thinking themselves free from it. Having killed the one allegedly responsible, civilization will begin again. There will therefore always be “victimage mechanisms to save.”

The victim not only would restore peace to civilization, but may even restore civilization to mankind, because communities are as likely to form from persuasion against a victim as from persuasion toward anything else (see Cicero), or from the desire for protection (see Hobbes and Locke). Mankind, who so recently thought of itself as enlightened, may experience such relief that it even deifies its victim over time.

Things that would disrupt this cycle are divine intervention, global nuclear holocaust, or an immediately lethal pandemic. To assume divine intervention is to jump ahead to Girard’s solution (the Judeo-Christian scriptures) without properly characterizing the problem. To assume nuclear holocaust achieves Girard’s apocalypse, but it sidesteps the global mimetic crisis, for global nuclear holocaust might follow from only a few hundred people with nuclear capability who would die in the process. Although those few hundred would view their victims as scapegoats, the ensuing destruction of humanity could hardly be said to follow from global mimetic contagion. To assume an immediately lethal pandemic also achieves apocalypse but neglects mimetic contagion, or for that matter, violence.

Interestingly, a fairly literal reading of St. John’s Apocalypse portrays the destruction of humanity not as destroying one another, but as a global civilization united at Armageddon against the Lamb. But here divine intervention destroys humanity, not men and women massacring their neighbor vigilantes.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

Post a message:
This forum requires an account to post.
[ Create Account ]
[ Login ]
[ Contact Forum Admin ]

Forum timezone: GMT-8
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.