Dr
who writes here on Substack recently wrote an engaging essay called René Girard, J.D. Vance, and You. In it he describes the unsettling moment he realised that former President Donald J. Trump’s pick for running mate, J.D. Vance, has been using the work of the late René Girard, world renown philosopher and literary scholar, to bolster his authoritarian views in stark contrast to Girard’s work on mimesis and rivalry. The following essay relies heavily on themes of mimesis as understood and projected from Girard’s teachings. If you need a refresher in understanding the intricacies of mimesis or Girard, I highly suggest taking a pause here and familiarising yourself through Dr Enright’s work and through the links provided in his essay. You might also consider browsing the work of Dr and his book The Human Catechism which deals with many of the same themes.It Ain’t Me Babe
Why Jesus Isn't the Revolutionary Leader We Want
God is not the hero of our story. He is the loser—and perhaps even the enemy. In our cultural myths of war, a hero fights, wins or dies trying. They fight for their country, and for their culture because, if they don’t win, everything they stand for and everyone they love runs the risk of erasure—a sentiment that former war correspondent Chris Hedges says is simply not true. In War is a Force that Gives us Meaning (2002) Hedges writes,
“the myth of war rarely endures for those who experience combat. War is messy, confusing, sullied by raw brutality and the elephantine fear that grabs us like a massive bouncer who comes up from behind.”1
Hedges goes on to describe the horrors of waiting for a conflict to ensue adding the advice one Marine Corp Lieutenant offered before a battle,
“ Just remember…none of these boys is fighting for home, for the flag, for all that crap the politicians feed the public. They are fighting for each other, just for each other.”2
Throughout the book Hedges describes what he calls the myth of war in contrast to the sensory of war. He writes,
“We are humiliated in combat. The lofty words that inspire people to war—duty, honor, glory—swiftly become repugnant and hallow…Once in a conflict, we are moved from the abstract to the real, from the mythic to the sensory.”3
In the same ways there is a cultural myth around the life and death of Christ that he is our hero; our martyr who advanced every good thing about his cause and is the supreme example we ought to imitate. Like all good myths they are based in truth, but here’s the thing, Jesus makes for a terrible revolutionary leader.
Jesus is Not a Martyr
We forget that the concept of martyrdom with the meaning of having died for a cause is only as old as the early Christian Church and our modern understanding is as young as the 16th Century with the first publishing of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs in January of 1563. To the first century world, Jesus didn’t win—he lost very badly. In fact, he didn’t just lose, he put himself at enmity with winning. Jesus lost so hard that losing became the new winning; death became life, failure became success; thus birthing the concept of martyrdom which transferred its original meaning from “witness” to, “those put to death testifying”. If there is a mimetic desire that Jesus didn’t turn on its head, we don’t know about it. So, when political actors in the name of Christian Nationalism take hold of mimetic language to describe their desire to see the whole nation be subjugated to Jesus it sits as a supreme example of “one of these things, is not like the others”.
There’s something amiss with the idea that Jesus and the Apostles turned the world upside down4 uprooting the mimetic desires of their age just to replace them with Jesus or new desires to mirror. Jesus seems to be calling us to lives lived beyond desire—even good desires like life and health and peace—he calls us beyond the parroting of so-called Christian values and virtues.
No, You’re saying it wrong it’s Mim-E-sis not My-me-sis!
Mimesis is definitely a spell you’d learn at Hogwarts as a kind of child-friendly version of the Imperius Curse; one of three forbidden curses which controls your enemies . All that aside coming to the realisation that mimesis is a thing is brutal. It unveils everything we guise with magical thinking and lays it bare before us and God. Vocations and callings are taken from the mountain top of divine encounter to the valley of the natural outcome of our mimetic formation. They stand naked as a gelling effect of a certain path with our mimetic idiosyncrasies, a job or life choice that fulfils our underlying mirror categories for what makes life worthwhile; a natural continuation of everything we have been raised to believe. It knocks over the pillars built in worship of Angry God and leaves our temples ransacked of our sacred implements of worship. Emotions themselves are dragged through the streets as bodily triggers we picked up by osmosis from watching the desires of others and hot keying love, anger and fear to the same toggles. Everything from a Meet Cute to Schadenfreude is wired in; but the scary thing is that no one but us did the wiring and it’s a rat’s nest of a wiring job being wired and rewired since birth—and yet we remain alive, for the most part, though, most of the time, operating on auxiliary power.
Can you see the Matrix yet? No? Is it because you’re afraid to look? Me too. I’m afraid of the things I copy and pasted into my life. Afraid that in reviewing them I will still find them desirable though they damage the people around me. I was afraid to pull my first breaker down that powered my will to go to Church and be around people I would only imitate to all of our destruction. The more I learn about where I came from, the less I want to look—but I continue to stare into the rat’s nest; plugging and unplugging, pulling breakers when necessary and chucking burnt out fuses onto the growing pile produced as a biproduct of my overloaded circuits. At various times the breaker has been pulled on my relatives, my marriage, most often on my non-existent career, my friendships, my duties. Most times it’s because the breaker has blown— no choice in the matter. Too much power, not enough processing.
But I present white and male and cis-gendered and so am preconditioned to feel comfortable poking at the rat’s nest. I know that if I get burnt, society comes to the rescue. Can’t have a precious white male blink out! Mimetic dysregulation is the norm for many who are not as privileged as I am to receive the ready care and attention they need should they bump into their circuit board and several lights go out. Where there is little safety net, magical thinking abounds; God speaks more to those who desire the divine assurance that what they are doing is the right thing to do and to not do it would be sin. I mean…after that, why wouldn’t we copy what God has said to someone else? If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me. Thus, the cycle of mimesis continues. To give us a better grasp on the whole topic of mimesis, let’s look at happens when things go awry.
Mimetic Dysregulation
Most of us mimic one behaviour after another and in instances where one function is weaker than another the stronger one prevails. I desire to continue writing uninterrupted but also have to use the toilet. Hopefully my mimetic compulsion to listen to my body and use the culturally appropriate means to dispose of my waste is the stronger of the two and so I leave my work and attend to the necessary. This categorisation of desires of the body vs. desires of the mind are also a mimetic function. I desire a certain level of health in body, soul and spirit and so I toggle from one to the other attempting to maintain momentum of mimetic cogency in everything.
Mimetic Dysregulation occurs when two behaviours come into direct conflict with one another because of equal compulsion. I desire something but the fallout of that desire is equally undesirable and so the proverbial fuse blows and I’m back to rewiring my network. Usually in those situations a blown fuse means an overall positive form of inaction—the desire was not achieved but the perceived negative effects were avoided, apart from the blow out! Keep in mind of course that positive and negative are mimetic categories for use in measuring the quality of our mirror effect. Pulling your hair out? Me too.
From Desire to Desired
René Girard reminds us that desire has a funny way of giving way to the primary interface; that people are so much more compelling than the things they desire and so become the desire themselves. Girard is well known for highlighting the negative ways this takes place in regard to rivalry, but this transference of desire also takes place in a relatively positive regard in hero worship. Villains embody every evil desire and Heroes every wholesome thing, by mirroring one or the other we become the hero or villain of our mimetic culture. At least, this is how I grew up, until the hero/villain arc turned into the anti-hero arc where the hero has bad sexual ethics, drinks too much, and is a hothead but has a strong sense of justice and a smoulder that makes Lady Liberty melt or else, the villain who is a loving family man, successful in everything he does but secretly wants to take over the world by any means necessary.
Beyond Desire
We have different developmental stages of desire on display here. For instance, we desire our parents at first because we think they are faultless; our heroes, we then desire them because of some sense of love despite their faults; our anti-heroes and then for a time lose track of that love for their faults in a negative draw towards them; the villains or at the very least—our rivals. The longer we stare the more the roiling ocean of what is the case and what is a secondary interfacial front reveals the chaos of mimetic dysregulation within all of us.
Mimesis cuts through every interface such that desires become indistinguishable from the people we first encounter who show us these new and exciting desires. Nothing overshadows our first car, our first love, our first string of sexual experiences; these desires are inextricably tied to our firsts because we eventually stop looking at our desire and start looking at the people who embody that desire. Had we continued with them we would have progressed in our desire until they themselves became undesirable to the point of truly seeing them. Only when we have truly seen someone can we love them beyond the desires they embody. In the same way, it is only when we allow ourselves to be seen as more than useful or fulfilling to some cultural mythology that we transcend the myth and enter the sensory where we can be loved beyond desire.
I think Jesus displayed this well when he said,
32 “If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. 33 And if you do good to those who do good to you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. 34 And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to get back the same amount. 35 But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. 36 Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.
Luke 6:32-36 ESV
The love Jesus describes at first could very well be the stage of conflating our desires with those who can fulfil them, or at least don’t get in the way and the later love of the Father to that love which only comes at the cost of our idealisations and mythologising of people as the centre of our cultural mimetic desires. Mercy is seen as the highest form of love to give and receive even over mutual kindness and reciprocated generosity and other forms of love that follow a certain transactional use.
Can you see how applying mimetic language to the Christian life and therefore to Jesus is monumentally problematic? We start to treat Jesus as the embodiment of everything we desire; which preaches but what happens when our desires are full of metaphysical lies which we still claim Jesus as the fulfilment of those evil desires?
The God Who Became our Enemy to Become our Love
Jesus set himself against being the mimetic fulfilment of the return of the throne of David, so why do we think he wants to sit in the Presidency of the United States or, for that matter, any other nation? To answer this we have to consider that mimesis is the norm, but so too is the intense lack of meaningful love, by Jesus’ definition; that love which shows mercy the highest form of love. It may be the case that Jesus set himself against being the fulfilment of our desires because the love God has for us cannot be contained in mimetic, mythological categories. For this reason, God in the flesh became the enemy of everything we desired out of the Kingdom of God by submitting to death. Even our desire for salvation got in the way of our love for God. Thus, it is written,
“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.”
Luke 9:23-24 ESV
In a very real sense God is calling us to become the enemy of our mimetic desires in such a way as to love ourselves beyond desire; to leave the mythical and enter the sensory. In becoming our own worst enemies, we achieve reintegration with our Anthrohead; body, soul and spirit as one in order to see ourselves as we truly exist and to accept mercy from God who saw us this way the whole time.
3 Suggested Applications
Take Care in Leaving Your Cultural Mythologies Behind
It is not the job of Christianity to offer a convincing narrative for the world, but some people think it is and if you find yourself a part of a heavily crafted Christian Mythology you may find that it is very difficult to cast it off and see the the world in the sensory. Next week we will get into how this might take place but for now consider focusing your thoughts and prayers on seeing the world as God sees it—not in some concocted story or a series of unfortunate events (Lemony Snicket’s or otherwise) but as that of people believing a mythology often full of metaphysical lies and acting accordingly.
Be Like Christ is not a call to Make Christ the Embodiment of Your Desires
Identify where you or others have interpreted passages of Scripture instructing us to “be like Christ,” to mean Make Christ the Embodiment of Your Desire. Where has that led to dissonance between the Jesus we want to be our Revolutionary leader and the Jesus of the Bible?
Don’t Give Up on Your Enemies—They are on the Doorstep of Love
If it is true that when we stop looking and investing in people they remain in the mythological category we left them in, then our enemies are on the doorstep of being loved beyond desire. They are some of the few people who properly understand us as the complex creatures we are. They are unsurprised by our humanity and that makes them uniquely qualified to love us and us them. Mercy is the highest form of love because reconciliation is the message Christ came to deliver from the Father. This week meditate on what it might take to love beyond desire.
Thanks for being here and I’ll see you around notes!
Dun Dun Duuuuhn. Tune in Next Week to Not My People’s Publication to find out what to do when you can’t unglue.
In all seriousness though. See you next week
Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, (2002) Ch 1: The Myth of War pg. 38
ibid pg. 38
ibid pg. 40
Said of the Apostles and the early church recorded in Acts 17:6.