This was my thought, too. Maybe the mob either turns on the alpha or the omega. One skill that helps you stay in power as an alpha is the ability to redirect the mob - always give them a scapegoat.
Man, I screwed this one up so badly. Most of the problems involved bugs going back and forth between two Substack editors, but the "lighting" one is totally on me.
Girard presumably wrote in French - is it possible that somewhere in the translation from Greek to English, or Greek to French to English, there was a tense ambiguity or a tense change?
Do you happen to know what the standard French translation of the Gospel of Luke says? (Most people wouldn't, but you seem like someone who might, or who might be interested enough to look it up!)
Greek and French are the only foreign languages I speak (badly), and neither has very tense structure that doesn't map easily onto the English one. Though of course it's possible that it's stylish in French or Greek to use present tense in a situation that calls for past or vice versa.
Love it - I imagined the lighting rig come crashing down as the climax of an Iron Maiden concert in Tel Aviv, wreaking death and destruction, as the band played on '666 the number of the beast' etc...
Basically, the claim is that Christianity has gone thru ~500-year cycles as the basic story breaks down, and then is reforged according to contemporary sensibilities, and that social justice / wokeness is the 5th such cycle. Importantly, the change each time has involved the movement of authority--the last cycles moving from the institutional authority of the pope to the individual conscience / interpretation of the Bible and now to egalitarian crowdsourcing. (Which is code for 'mob rule' and seems pretty bad from where I sit.)
Yes, all of that reads like common sense by now. A new source of justified institutional authority doesn't appear to be immediately forthcoming, so the mob rule is going to have to burn itself out, the extent of collateral damage remaining to be seen. Unless of course we manage to build the artificial savior/destroyer sooner.
If by "wokeness" you actually mean the largely-online collection of buzzwords and cultural practices of the last decade, this claim absolutely takes the cake for the most extreme lack of historical perspective I have *ever* seen.
Seriously? Once-in-500-year religious upheavals include the Crusades, the Reformation and...wokeness? This is almost literally equivalent to saying American history has had three great conflicts: the revolution, the civil war, and the arguments over Hillary Clinton's emails. It takes lack of perspective to a level far beyond parody. Can we *at least* wait until wokeness has been around for a full century, has had several major wars fought over it, and has become a foundational part of many countries' political systems, before declaring it the new reformation?
If by wokeness you mean something more like "the entire concept of social progressivism" this claim would sound reasonable, but it doesn't seem like that's what's meant.
It's pretty staggering, but I don't think it's exactly puzzling. I think that a lot of Scott's readership consists of people who started out left wing, and see wokeness as the thing that alienated them from their own political faction.
What do you mean? Was there an equivalent sense of twice-in-a-millenium significance of that time period? I don’t know much about progressivism in the 60s
I mean that the revolutionary youth of the day felt that they needed to reject what we would now call the "Establishment Left" (the labor unions and such) almost as much as the "Establishment Right." That's whay they called themselves "The New Left" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left).
I'd argue that we're nearing the end of the 4th era. What we have right now is just the end result of moralism, which started about 400 years ago. Given current technological developments, there might not even be a 5th era...
No, I think I summarized it incorrectly. They see it more as "250 years of the thing breaking apart and 250 years of the new thing solidifying", tho my view is that the jumps are more discrete.
> If by wokeness you mean something more like "the entire concept of social progressivism" this claim would sound reasonable, but it doesn't seem like that's what's meant.
I don't have a great label for pointing at the thing that seems most relevant to me. I would call it something like "popularist moralism". That is, "popularist" means that rather than coming from the logical extrapolations of a set of axioms or a particular person or institution, it's coming from "what seems right to right-thinking people", which is a much more dynamic and fluid object. "Moralism" means that it views itself as having moral force and being about going from ought to is. I think that "wokeness" construed broadly describes that, and construed narrowly is much less.
Two hundred years ago, abolitionists were primarily motivated by Protestantism. What are the abolitionists of today primarily motivated by?
I would argue that what you are describing is always the basis of popular morality. I am not convinced that most ordinary people habitually put much more thought into it than that.
200 years ago, slavery was motivated by seeming right (and axiomatically ordained by the Bible) to right thinking (Christian) people. Ask any Englishman in 1899 if the Hindoo had any right thinking beliefs worthy of contemplation. Calling popularist moralism a new widespread phenomenon feels too convenient
On the slavery point, I agree there were both pro-slavery and anti-slavery Christians in 1823. The thing that seems astonishing to me is the absence of anti-slavery non-Christians at that point and earlier. (Lots of people thought "we don't want to be slaves" but the idea of not having slaves anywhere seems to be rare.)
I think there were a bunch of Indophile Englishmen in 1899, so I'm not sure what you mean by your second sentence. Besides that, I don't think the English sense of the superiority of English thought rested on "lots of people think this" rather than something more like "it's logical"; the thing that's important is the movement of _how and why_ people justify their beliefs.
I think one has to understand that slavery in some form had been near universal since the beginning of civilization. No doubt preindustrial people found it hard to even imagine such a radical departure from what they knew.
As for the English thing, popular culture in the late 1800's held that different ethnicities differed in terms of their inherited potential. It was qualtiy of the blood of their ancestors that ensured the supposed superiority of their society.
Slavery had been near universal since the beginning of civilization, but Western civilization's turn away from that nigh-universality started more like 400 years ago and "Slavery Bad!" was probably the dominant position by 1823.
Which is not to say that mainstream Western civilization 200 years ago was racially egalitarian or anything like that. You can believe someone to be inferior while still believing it would be wrong to enslave them.
That might be true, but all the liberal reforms from 60s-70s led directly to the abuse crisis or simply the emptying of the churches, or both. What is not said, is that the more liberal diocese had the biggest abuse problems, all those guitar masses attracted assholes. What you are seeing now in the Vatican is the dying gasp of some old hippies.
The younger generation of priests is so much better, they were mostly homeschooled. This is why the argentinian is so afraid.
“Nietzsche proposed that we stop all of this, return to square one, and re-adopt a “master morality” that idolizes the powerful.”
Not sure if you’re quoting Girard here, but this is incorrect and a common misconception about Nietzsche. His idea of the Übermensch transcends both master and slave morality, and while he does “prefer” masters to slaves, he doesn’t really like either.
Then I think I genuinely don't understand this. The Ubermensch is powerful, strong-willed, martial, beautiful, and all the other things that master morality says are good. How is siding with the Ubermensch not siding with master morality?
They are entirely different concepts and I can’t explain it in detail in a Substack comment. The Ubermensch is a creator of new life-affirming values, not just an ultra powerful Machiavellian figure. This is a mass media trope that has little to do with his real philosophy.
Nietzsche prefers the masters but also praises slave morality for adding inwardness and debt to the human soul.
It's been years since I read any Nietzsche too, but IIRC I got something pretty close to what you did out of it; I think — as I understood it — the main difference between master and Übermensch is that someone operating by the former morality is still trapped by the values given to him, whereas the latter creates his own (which obviously takes strength of will, power, etc. to do — but not popularity, necessarily*).
But I've undoubtedly forgotten or missed some subtlety only a true Mitteleuropäer could understand.
--------------------------
* what's the significance of this aside? I don't know but I'm leaving it in in case it becomes useful or seems smart
Morality is really just a fancy name for "prevailing ideas on what is proper and beneficial to society". There is no such thing as absolute morality, even if in practice some moral values are esteemed by nearly every society.
So someone who "creates their own" morality seems almost a contradiction in terms, unless it just means "ploughs their own furrow, indifferent to anyone else's approval or otherwise". That doesn't necessarily take strength of will or power. For example, as far as I can see, a hobo swilling cider on a park bench all day and sleeping in a hedge each night satisfies the condition.
With respect to those who know much much more about Nietzsche than I do, are the two concepts really *that* distinct? I admit I haven't read GoM or TSZ, but the arguments I've seen by Nietzsche fans that they are distinct usually seem pretty strained to me, and much more complex and subtle than they would be if the distinction were really that basic and incontrovertible. Could one say that there was supposed to be a distinction, but N. himself didn't always have it clear in his head? I have this memory that, as historical examples of the Ubermensch, N. suggested Caesar and Napoleon. Could one at least say that, even if the common conception of Ubermensch misconstrues Nietzsche, N. himself is partly responsible?
Yes, they are entirely different things. Master/slave morality is a description of a type of human psychology that has played out over millennia. The Übermensch is a hypothetical figure for the present/future that is a creator of values.
Nietzsche does not use Napoleon or Caesar as examples of the Übermensch, he uses them as examples of "free spirits" or admirable figures. Übermensch translates as "over man" and is intended to be the figure transcending the "death of God" and modernity's nihilism crisis.
This distinction is not really that difficult or unclear and anyone familiar with Nietzsche will tell you the exact same thing. The only people with issues understanding this are those that haven't seem to actually read his books or any secondary literature on the topic. Which is odd to me why they insist on commenting about something they haven't read, but alas...
So does Nietzsche not, in fact, admire and praise master morality, and at a certain length, even if it's not the same as Ubermenschheit?
And, with respect, I don't think you should so dismiss people who have "issues with understanding this." Some of us are genuinely curious, but we're not prepared to just throw in a "Yes, Socrates, that's certainly true" and be done with it. Voicing authority is not the same as intellectual exchange.
Yes as I said in the original comment, Nietzsche prefers master morality to slave morality, but is still critical of it and doesn't want to return the world to a master morality system – nor does he think such a thing would even be possible in our modern era, as we have undergone nearly 2,000 years of Christian history. This is all covered quite well in Nietzsche's books and essays.
You'll have to excuse my dismissive response and I hope it doesn't come off as being too rude, but nothing I've written here is anything other than basic knowledge about the man's philosophy that any reasonably intelligent person could pick up from reading his Wikipedia page and a book or two.
He's been dead for 123 years and there are numerous free resources online to learn about his ideas. His books and their translations are in the public domain. So try to understand why it can be frustrating to people that have done their (very easy) homework when others can't bother to do the slightest bit of research on their own and instead insist, "either you explain this complex philosophy to me in the comment section here or it's obviously a stupid idea that I can rightly dismiss."
>Could ye CREATE a God?--Then, I pray you, be silent about all Gods! But
ye could well create the Superman.
>
>Not perhaps ye yourselves, my brethren! But into fathers and forefathers
of the Superman could ye transform yourselves: and let that be your best
creating!--
But my personal interpretation is that the ubermensch is literally post-human, and is better translated as the humorous "post man" or the unfortunately already taken "trans man", so it may take as long as it took humans to arrive from apes (although perhaps not, since we have the unique ability to transcend what is animal in us, which would include gene therapy and directed breeding):
>All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and ye
want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the
beast than surpass man?
>
>What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the
same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame.
>
>Ye have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still
worm. Once were ye apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than any of
The Übermensch idea is popular in common discourse about Nietzsche, but honestly it does not play that much of a role in his philosophy. The Übermensch is a big deal in Zarathustra, but barely mentioned elsewhere. Kasimir's comments here are basically right. But don't feel badly if you find Nietzsche to be unclear. He comments (tongue-in-cheek) in Beyond Good and Evil (sec 27) that he obviously tries to do everything he can to make himself hard to understand!
If you need one more "+1, Kiefer has a good take" consider this is. I'm no philosopher, but I did read a lot of Nietzsche very carefully, and my take was that Ubermensch construct was not what most people think it is.
To put more historical perspective on why it is, Nietzsche's sister (? some female relative) after his death took one or several of his works, added a "this proves Nazis are right" interpretations, and took it to the Nazi propaganda machine, which agreed.
So pretty much now most of society is unwittingly just reciting bad Nazi propaganda when they talk about Nietzsche.
I continue to pray that the rationalist community will pick up some Nietzsche and humbly admit that their Wikipedia level knowledge of his work is a massive philosophical blindspot. It renders most of the writing about religion and morality in the Rat community totally embarrassing. Like poorly read grad students they arrive at hazy, half-baked versions of the ideas Nietzsche put down 100 years ago. The sequence of books from Beyond Good and Evil to Ecce Homo aren't even difficult.
Well, the rationalist community doesn't take them seriously because they'd rather die than write clearly and comprehensibly. To be fair, Nietzsche is an exception for the most part.
Genealogy of Morals is a very clearly written book, and if one finds it incomprehensible it's probably because of how deeply the ideas it undermines are ingrained in one's worldview.
I think it's a bit much to say that "no one in the actual philosophy community takes the Rationalist community very seriously". I like to think I'm someone in the "actual philosophy community" (I've been tenured in philosophy departments at three different universities, and have published papers in many highly-regarded journals) and I take the Rationality community fairly seriously (much of my recent work has been engaging with the various decision theories that emerged from the Rationalist community that recommend one-boxing in classic Newcomb cases, but not "medical Newcomb" cases).
There's obviously a lot of people here who qualify as dilettantes, at best - but that's what you get from a public internet forum. It's still a philosophically interesting community that has interesting and novel ideas that deserve to be written up in philosophically-comprehensible forms, even if I think that a lot of it is wrong or misguided (though probably less so than a large number of ideas that have currency in the actual philosophy community.
Usually I would ban you for the offense of "saying people are incredibly stupid and should be ashamed of themselves but not giving any arguments or suggesting what in particular they need to correct", but I am interested enough in this that I will give you a chance to tell me the arguments, if you could possibly condescend to doing so.
I've read about 4-5 Nietzsche books but it was a *long* time ago and I may have forgotten some things, please have patience with me.
>Usually I would ban you for the offense of "saying people are incredibly stupid and should be ashamed of themselves but not giving any arguments or suggesting what in particular they need to correct"
Well, I don't know. I feel like the quoted sentiment is sometimes...well, not appropriate, exactly, but certainly understandable. I can easily picture a rationalist, who for the hundredth time is reading one of those asinine critiques of 'rationalism' that completely miss the point, and has no patience for anything other than "you have no idea what you're talking about, go read the Sequences".
The bannable part of that post is the way it unreasonably singles out rationalists, as they don't particularly stand out among the many, many laypeople who (presumably) have a very distorted understanding of Nietzsche due to the way popular culture portrays him.
I'm also curious what Whimsi will suggest here, but their claim that "the sequence of books from BGE to EH aren't even difficult" is just plain false. Nietzsche was a seductive trickster figure (in Liam Kofi Bright's taxonomy, a "sexy murder poet") whose writings deliberately invited misinterpretation.
Half-baked interpretations of Nietzsche are hardly the exclusive domain of "the rationalist community."
Well, thanks for not banning me. I didn’t mean to imply anyone was stupid, only that they have neglected a very specific body of important work. Someone rightfully pointed out below that it’s frustrating to see someone come out with some bold anti-Rat post, when it’s entirely clear they haven’t even attempted to read the sequences. This is a similar situation.
I’m being entirely sincere, and of course I do not believe that rationalists are particularly egregious in misinterpreting Nietzsche. My inflammatory tone is the result of frustration from an extremely impressive community failing to even address the writer who is essentially the basis of all meta-analyses of morals, and their development from pre-antiquity. He is why we in the west can turn a lens on our lenses (which is why he’s not really a figure of the right, but much more the father of Deleuze, Foucault, etc. than Hitler).
I know that’s extremely general, but it sort of has to be, unless I’m going to put together an essay. Nietzsche demands the ‘read the sequences’ treatment—his work is so varied and concise that he can only be meaningfully summarized with extreme effort and specific application of one idea or fragment at a time. His books are literally collections of hundreds of interconnected ‘blog posts’ of 100-5,000 words in length, written with intentional disregard for overriding theses or ‘points’ that they are trying to prove in totality.
I refuse to say Nietzsche is ‘difficult’ because he is always presenting his criticisms (and 90% of his work is made up of polemics and criticisms of concepts/people which came before) in the most concise form possible. People say he is difficult because it’s almost impossible to divine a coherent ideology from such an immense collection of polemics—which is precisely what he says he wanted! He always describes himself as a transitional figure, a wily critic who only occasionally dares to venture an ‘ought’.
In the fewest words possible: Nietzsche is the premier historian of conceptual formation and drift within western culture: his work attempts to scrutinize how the western map of the moral world came to be in pre-history, as well as how it has changed as a result of mimetic spread across cultures, and within individual minds. However before everything else, he was a prodigal philologist, and that may be the most important thing about him.
I do not believe Rationalists, nor any other philosophical movement can understand their place in the collective moral/psychic development of humanity without having read that development’s chief historian and critic.
The recurring problem with not having a coherent worldview and being exclusively polemic is that you can arbitrarily raise your standard for what is acceptable, or even have inconsistent standards for what is acceptable, if 2+2 =4 is bad because it's true and also 2+2!=4 is also bad because it's false, that is wholly uninteresting except for the volume of negative valence words you can attach to either.
Not that I can say that Nietzsche has this problem, but keeping this important background point in mind for responses is necessary for people to make sense of a philosopher. For an COMPLETELY ignorant example, if the ubermensch is distinct from the master and the slave, 1. Why doesn't the master slave dichotomy just cover the entire space of human experience 2. If it doesn't represent human experience, in what circumstances can I consider this useful rather than throwing up my hands and saying "everyone is a bit of master and a bit of slave" 3. Considering the above, how is the ubermensch distinct?
I don't think any of the above points are an actual stance anyone has, or contains any type of crux, but if I do become dissatisfied with any philosophical stance, that's the context I would need to be satisfied beyond explaining what was written.
Following up on this thread in hopes it may result in a 5% chance of Scott reading Beyond Good and Evil, Genealogy of Morals, and Ecce Homo (but hopefully skipping Zarathustra) and writing a long post that brings N into the light for Rationalists.
This is a great comment in and of itself, and certainly one Nietzsche would agree with. However implicit in it is a misunderstanding of the illustrative examples (which you say, and seem to expect). The reason Nietzsche isn’t dissatisfying in this way is because he isn’t slapping the SM dichotomy on human experience and calling it a day. As I said before, Nietzsche is far more accurately described as a historian of collective development rather than a philosopher in the same sense as the major figures he’s usually associated with.
In this case, he’s interested in the way the human animal’s physical and mental make up informs it’s cultural and individual development into a being that must form moral priors and act. What he provides is a detailed account of this history and it’s antecedents, taking special interest in the actual moment to moment processes within a mind when it is, say, humiliated in the face of betters, or presented with an insoluble problem. He then takes those base psychological facts and extrapolates and interpolates them from and into western history.
Allegory: One alien biologist might find a human hand bone and spend his career in confirming his initial observation that this body part would have been best used for clutching things.
Imagine another finds the same bone and instead goes into the fossil record and determines that it must have evolved from a fish’s flipper, and thus likely has some vestigial parts, and is far from efficient, and must then be a transitional tool for the animal in the same way as the flipper was, and might indeed be just one small part of a larger mechanism that in totality did not clutch or grab anything at all.
The second biologist is only an uninteresting, content-free polemicist in so far as he refuses to abandon his skepticism in the face of questions he doesn’t yet have information enough to understand, let alone answer. The master-slave dichotomy is just one extremely short hand way of summarizing ONE manner in which humans organize themselves morally in correspondence with the landscape of reality, like different balls randomly scattered across a topographic map.
Here is a brief example of Nietzsche’s ‘diagnostic’ style, taking into account that this is one tiny paragraph that builds towards a broader look at the origins of Christian Morality:
As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies - but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred. The truly great haters in the world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness.
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). Essay 1, Section 7
Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil are reasonable recommendations, but I would recommend Gay Science instead of Ecce Homo. In fact, I would say if you are going to read just one book by Nietzsche to decide whether you want to read others, Gay Science is the best choice.
Ecce Homo is a terrible choice for a short Nietzsche reading list, especially if the list is intended for someone who is not initially sympathetic to Nietzsche. (I read it as a teenager and quickly came to the conclusion that Nietzsche was an idiot not worth wasting my time on.) It would maybe be good to read as one's seventh or eighth Nietzsche book, after GS, GM, BGE, TI, BT, Z, and perhaps D or UM.
Replying here because I agree with Whimsi that better familiarity with Nietzsche in these parts could be good, with a big caveat (see below). I also don't think Whimsi or Kiefer are doing an adequate job of addressing a few of the great misconceptions coming up here, e.g. about master and slave moralities, partly because they insist that doing so would take an essay, and that reading the books for yourself is easy.
I think they're dead wrong on the books point: understanding the books is not easy. I don't claim to understand them adequately, and I don't expect that to change by the end of my life. I'm not at all saying understanding N is impossible, just that it's not a thing that can be done with some casual reading, like understanding what Scott thinks about the Ketamine Placebo Effect can be. Some of this is because the material is just difficult, some of this is because Nietzsche's thought isn't presented in, and probably doesn't have, a *system*, and some of this is because Nietzsche invites misunderstanding and creative, potentially fruitful interpretation and misinterpretation.
That leads me to the BIG CAVEAT: Nietzsche's thought is dangerous insofar as it combines incisive and delightful polemics against moral and theoretical opinions that maintain civilized society with hazy prescriptions or programs that, seemingly by design, one could read many terrible things into. If I had a teenage son, I certainly wouldn't tell him to just go off and read Nietzsche by himself, just like I wouldn't tell him to go off and read Dabiq by himself. Casually reading Nietzsche, without seriously questioning him or being around people who will seriously question him can lead to acquiring shallow, morally corrosive opinions (e.g. lazily accepting some shallow version of Nietzschean relativism) and it can also lead to worse things. I'm not being a fuddy duddy; Nietzsche's dangerous. And it's not just my opinion: he said it first.
Anyways, here are a few points that address confusions here, that I think are more or less accurate, and that I hope make Nietzsche seem worth considering as a powerful and challenging source of thought on political-moral questions.
1. Yes, master morality and the idea of the ubermensch are different things.
- First, to clear up some basic confusions about what master and slave morality are, master morality is a moral system (using that term loosely) created by a people that takes itself as the starting point for what is good, and secondarily develops the idea of what is bad as what is not like itself. Slave morality is a moral system created by a people that takes the qualities of an oppressive people or force as the starting point for what is evil, and secondarily develops the idea of what is good as what is being oppressed, or does not oppress, is harmless, and things like that. Slave moralities do not have to remain, as they develop and spread, "servile" in a crude sense. The specific difference is this difference of what moral system focuses or centers itself on. I don't think that N says there can't be mixing, in that a people's moral system could be like one of these types in one realm and like another type in another realm. People and peoples are complicated, and I don't think N claims everything is either one or the other, plan and simple.
- Yes, N thinks that master morality is healthier than slave morality, but he doesn't think a return to master morality is possible or desirable. My rough account of the main reason for this is that N thinks the "masters" of yore had limited powers of self-awareness and introspection, and that the "slave revolt" in morality introduced these things as well as the rich, sometimes painful, sometimes exhilarating and elevating moral experiences of guilt, conscience, devotion, and the desire to overcome our psychological failings and limitations. These things are both here to stay (but that doesn't mean they can't be reshaped and reinterpreted) and genuine developments. Why are they developments? Because they open up a new field of play for the human will to power. The will to power is what makes humans tick. Rich interior life, for lack of a better phrase, is a new place for the human will to exert itself, in projects of self understanding and self mastery. Humanity is deeper, more interesting, greater (in potential) because of the "slave revolt" in morality.
Side note--correct me if I'm wrong, but IIRC, N maintains in several places that philosophy is a post-slave revolt phenomenon, and is something like the highest, most spiritual expression of the will to power. So that's another, somewhat concrete, way that N thinks that humanity after the slave revolt in morality is better, even if "sick" in new ways.
- How does the ubermensch fit in? Very roughly (take this with a grain of salt), the ubermensch is the idea of a future human being (or, more likely, human beings) who, finding themselves in this liminal historical period following the death of God (read "decay and collapse of metaphysical opinions that previously grounded opinions about morality and humanity's place in the world"), will create new opinions about humanity's place in the world and how humans should live. They will do so with the understanding that these new opinions cannot be grounded as they have been historically in metaphysical opinions, or, to say the same thing, that our place in the world and how we should live is not something that is given to us by a fixed external reality, but is creatively interpreted, willed, even "attempted" and "tested." Crucially, the ubermenschen themselves, as well as the inhabitants of their new worlds, will all have been deepened by the historical "slave revolt" and know about the psychological and moral landscape that revolt opened up for humanity. They will not, like the "masters" of yore, just assert that what is like them is good, most of all because 1) they will know that their assertion is grounded only in their will, not in reality and 2) because they will not be complacent with their own example of humanity, but will be striving to create something better than themselves, more powerful, yes, but also more sensitive, more subtle, more alive to the heights of human being that the slave revolt has revealed (see above example of philosophy)
2. Something helpful to me, in trying to get a grip on N's thought, is the following rough comparison between him and the Greeks (meaning here Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle). The Greeks roughly agree that philosophy is the greatest human activity, or that the highest human longing is to understand the nature of our world and ourselves (so, pursuing questions like "what is justice," and "are there fixed natures, or is our world determined by divine will or something else incomprehensible," and in general trying to understand natural necessities, assuming they exist). They are able to maintain this position in part because they think that there indeed are fixed natures, and that the human mind can make contact with them. Nietzsche does not seem to think that philosophy is the highest human life. The obvious example here is the ubermensch, which is a human type that has some "philosophical" characteristics but is certainly not a philosopher in any straightforward sense and seems, in N's thought, to be a higher expression of human life. This is probably in part because Nietzsche, although certainly not a theist, does not think there is stable, intelligible nature. Instead of perceiving or receiving the external world, the human mind is always "willing" it into some shape or other. What is called philosophy is hence just a very subtle, very ambitious expression of the will to power, not the pursuit of understanding. Since we are "willing" the world around us, there is great variety in the different worlds (i.e. subjective experiences of the world) that exist. In this situation where philosophy in the classical sense is impossible and there is no knowable external world, the closest analog to understanding the external world is to have your unique, created model of the world (but again, no territory, just a map that you have willed) be the model of the world that everyone else, as much as possible, wills for themselves. Thus, philosophy, once understood for what it actually is, points beyond itself to the ubermensch, to creating and imposing new visions of humanity and the world on everyone else, to radical, potentially very dangerous political and legislative projects.
(An interesting question here is whether I've got the causality right: is it the impossibility of philosophy as classically understood that leads N to the idea of the will to power as the fundamental human force and thence to things like the idea of the ubermensch, or is it the idea of the will to power that leads to the impossibility of philosophy etc.?)
If someone actually wrote a post about Nietzsche and connected the ideas to various things in the Sequences, and/or tried to argue that the Nietzsche version is better in various ways then it would probably get good uptake.
Adorno was all about dialectic, so the idea underlying that laconic statement is that a crude slave morality (e.g. "wokeness") was that it merely offers the antithesis of the master morality. It leaves the fundamental structural relationships in place and merely inverts the value judgments. It is not "the same thing" as the master morality in that it offers different value judgments, but it is "still the master morality" (immer noch Herrenmoral) in that it presupposes the master morality rather than transcends it. This is why slave morality cannot be the final morality, and why it doesn't yield the possibility of true emancipation, which requires a form of thought that transcends both slave and master morality.
On my reading, Adorno and Nietzsche are roughly in agreement up to here, and would also agree that we cannot transcend the master and slave moralities by merely seeking a compromise that keeps the best parts of each (i.e. the sort of crude solution an Aristotelian or an Englishman might propose). I think they would also agree that the problem is one whose solution lies in the future: neither Adorno nor Nietzsche thinks they have it all figured out already.
The divergence between Nietzsche and Adorno comes at the stage of imagining what form a solution might take. Nietzsche imagines a solution in the form of an individual psychology: the Ubermensch is the one who has solved the problem and whose actions are guided by neither the master or the slave morality, but by his own freely chosen values. Adorno, by contrast, imagines a solution taking the shape of a dialectical consciousness manifested in concrete forms of social life.
This is where Adorno gets a bit too Hegelian for me to be confident in my interpretation, but I think he is pointing towards the idea that the master and slave moralities are not fundamentally psychological phenomena, but "social facts." (Adorno's only explicit engagement with Durkheim was in the form of a fierce attack, but the Durkheimian phrase here offers a convenient label for a conceptual tool that Adorno, Marx and arguably even Hegel, all shared with that Frenchman.) Their psychological form is only the surface manifestation of a logic of social relations, so they cannot be transcended at the individual level just by thinking about things differently. Moving beyond them necessarily involves social transformation as well as individual psychological change.
Thanks for the comment. I agree that your first part is basically just what Nietzsche says, so I'm not sure Adorno has much novel thought to offer there.
"Nietzsche imagines a solution in the form of an individual psychology: the Ubermensch is the one who has solved the problem and whose actions are guided by neither the master or the slave morality, but by his own freely chosen values. "
There are a few scholars that question this individualist approach of Nietzsche and if you're interested in the topic, I recommend them. Specifically "Nietzsche's Philosophy of Religion" by Julian Young is very much an attempt to show how N's ideas were socially-minded, not just individually-minded.
I don't think Adorno was trying to say something "novel" with that line - it was just an aphorism that neatly summarizes why neither master morality nor slave morality solve the problems inherent in the other.
Young's claim that Nietzsche was a communitarian thinker gets a raised eyebrow from me, but I haven't looked into them in any detail. Maybe I will take a look when I get the chance.
I think my major problem with Nietzsche, besides the obvious, os that he is writing about the servility of Christianity at a time when Christianity dominated the world almost entirely. Japan being the only major exception I can think of.
If a particular ideology is world dominant and its adherents are the masters then calling that ideology servile lacks credibility.
I’m not. And I don’t really care to be because it looks like junk.
There’s a slave morality, there’s Übermensch and unterMensch but it’s not what you think, he was actually a hippy and loved people, particularly fond of children.
( The answer for perhaps for Nietzsche is to write more clearly. Use your words mate.)
Rather than direct us to the book we need to read to understand the guru’s words (which is something that any believer in astrology, or phrenology, or any other ideology could do) it’s surely incumbent on the purveyors of the philosophy to explain themselves, not to hand-wave away by saying the average guy “just doesn’t understand this”.
So what does Nietzsche want. What is his ideal society?
Nietzsche is concerned with nihilism; his argument is that the moral standards of European society (compassion for the oppressed) have become detached from their grounding because they are dependent on a Christianity that is no longer authoritative (God is dead is not a statement about how Christianity is false but rather that it is no longer sufficient as the foundation for political and social action). This threatens Western society with a complete collapse into meaninglessness unless there arises the creation of a new value system, the transvaluation of values; the ubermensch is he who is powerful enough in the broadest sense to be a self-creator and propagator of those new values.
Please never talk about Nietzsche again until you have actually read anything important he’s written
>I think my major problem with Nietzsche, besides the obvious, os that he is writing about the servility of Christianity at a time when Christianity dominated the world almost entirely.
>I’m not. And I don’t really care to be because it looks like junk.
Can you see the major problem of having a major problem with someone's ideas while simultaneously saying that you don't care to familiarize yourself with them?
>So what does Nietzsche want. What is his ideal society?
He didn't strike me as thinking in Socratic terms, ie the ideal form of some thing. From what I've read, Nietzsche was more specific when it came to diagnosing what he saw as the problem than when it came to the details of what he wants to come next (similar in this respect to Marx?). I don't think he had an ideal outcome (ideal society) in mind, but rather focused on the input (the system of values).
“ Can you see the major problem of having a major problem with someone's ideas while simultaneously saying that you don't care to familiarize yourself with them?”
I don’t believe I have to read a book on transubstantiation to resist the idea of transubstantiation. Or the best book on astrology to resist the influence of the stars.
I have read some of Nietzsche and it runs from being gibberish to being obviously wrong.
The fact that neither Marx nor Nietzsche propose solutions is part of the problem of both of their philosophies - they are unfalsifiable
Your strained analogy doesn't make any better your doubling down on not caring to understand something while simultaneously asserting that it's "obviously wrong". Rather it just paints you as someone incapable of thinking outside the bounds of WEIRD thinking and assumptions.
I don't see how one can claim that Marx didn't propose a solution. Workers of the world, unite! Post-capitalist utopia. Etc. (Wrong solution, of course, at least on any reasonable time scale.)
Yet then, in the 20th century, Christianity kind of voluntarily gave up world domination. Voluntarily giving up domination seems pretty unusual in history. Perhaps one could score that as an impressive sort-of-prediction by Nietzsche? (I‘m not familiar with his philosophy, though.)
It also became less Christian. In any case I’m not going to credit Nietzsche as a time traveller or fortune teller, he was writing about the era he was in.
I was coming here to say the same thing. In Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche says that the bad conscience (guilt, the result of Christian/slave morality) is an illness, but as pregnancy is an illness. After 2000 years of Christianity we can't go back to the morality of the "old masters"--we have to forge new kinds of morality, each of us finding our own categorical imperative (as he says in The Antichrist). Old master morality was about dominating others ("blonde beasts of prey"), but the morality of the Übermenschen will be about self-dominance, self-control, and self-creation. The interesting thing that Christianity did for human psychology is that it turned dominance instincts inwards; that is the consequence of ascetic values.
Quite a Nietzsche-thread you generated by your comment Kiefer.
But is not this whole quarrel about “what Nietzsche actually meant by what he wrote” misplaced. The thing is, Nietzsche is dead. We cannot ask him for clarifications if we disagree about how to interpret his texts. All we have are the texts. And any text can be interpreted in different ways.
That said, this does not mean that all texts yield the same (minimum) degree of resistance to any interpretation. You got to “do more interpretative work” to get some texts to align with, say, Nazism than others.
For example, it is possible to interpret the texts in the New Testament as support of apartheid and prohibiting mixed marriages. But you need to put in a lot of work to interpret the texts this way. We know that it can be done (the old white South Africans showed this), but it is not a smooth ride, so to speak.
The corresponding question to the texts Nietzsche left us, is: How much resistance does Nietzsches texts yield to a Nazi interpretation of his writings? Or: How much resistance does Nietzsches texts yield to a left-bank-of-the-Seine existentialist interpretation of his writings? And so forth.
As far as my limited reading of Nietzsche is any guide, and if the particular question is how much resistance these texts yield to a Nazi interpretation, my conclusion would be: Not that much.
Meaning that you do not have to stretch the texts very far to make them align with how his Nazi sister interpreted the texts of her brother.
It is certainly not the only interpretation. But you have to do less interpretation-work to make them align with Nazism, than, say, to make the texts in the New Testament align with an interpretation that white south Africans are a superior race and that mixed marriages are a sin toward God.
But again, it is possible. All interpretations of all texts are possible. But all texts also yield varying degrees of resistance to an interpretation (any interpretation).
No, all "interpretations are not possible." Some are more valid than others. How can we determine this? By reading the text.
> As far as my limited reading of Nietzsche is any guide
Which you obviously haven't done.
> how much resistance these text yields to a Nazi interpretation, my conclusion would be: Not that much.
Again: *countless* books have been written about this, no doubt none of which you've read. It was the primary topic concerning Nietzsche during the 50s, 60s, and 70s. See: Walter Kaufmann.
If you ask the people that have done their homework, what do they think? That he definitely wouldn't have agreed with the Nazis. Nietzsche is explicitly against some of the foundational ideas of Nazism. This is...right in the text. If Nietzsche were alive during the 1930s, I imagine he probably would have a viewpoint somewhere between Ernst Jünger and Harry Kessler, who were both anti-Nazi but on opposite ends of the political spectrum. You probably won't get these references because as you admitted, you've done little reading on the topic.
Nietzsche's sister also didn't "stretch the texts," she reorganized them and included notes as final published materials. Again, this is a basic historical fact.
It honestly boggles my mind that people insist on having stubborn opinions about something they have a tiny amount of experience with. It's absurd. Go read the works by an author before claiming to understand anything they've said. Otherwise you're just wasting everyone's time and lowering the quality of intellectual discussion.
FYI I have some knowledge of these texts and the secondary literature, but I deliberately did not want to go into that, or them, since my point was and is a more general one: When an author is dead, we only have the texts, and all texts can be interpreted in different ways - for example, literally or metaphorically (and that is just for starters).
We can hit each other over the head with our different interpretations of a text (any text) till the end of days, but we cannot really falsify an interpretation - "texts" are not empirical facts the way, say, the number of legs of my cat is an empirical fact.
That said, texts yield different degrees of "resitance" to various interpretations. Admittedly "resistance" is a difficult-to-specify word, but it is the closest we can get to say that one interpretation appears "truer" than another. Be it a text on Nietzsche, or Luke, or Plato, or Wittgenstein, or Rawls - all of them dead and unable to clarify "what they actually meant" to the many who spend their only life reading and discussing texts of authors they like.
Sure, and if we use your concept of resistance, then it's obvious to anyone _that's actually done the reading_ that certain viewpoints being ascribed to authors is simply absurd and nothing more than a creative writing exercise.
As you said in your previous comment:
> As far as my limited reading of Nietzsche is any guide, and if the particular question is how much resistance these texts yield to a Nazi interpretation, my conclusion would be: Not that much
This just communicates that you know essentially nothing about the author in question, and that such an interpretation has about as much truth value as a fanfiction. You didn't present it as a fanfiction, but as an actual truth about a real person, so no, this viewpoint doesn't have much value.
The degree to which we need to clarify "what they actually meant" is a nuanced discussion focused on finer details, not on basic facts that can be easily learned from reading what they wrote and what they did during their life. Again, this is really not a controversial discussion amongst people who have knowledge of the subject matter, and your proposed relativism is not a position that any serious thinker takes seriously.
All of this is a long-winded way of saying: just read an author's books. Until you do, your opinion on what they "really meant" is not of much value.
Kinda cool treatment, and I think I get the fast and loose, expansive take, but did I actually read you right about ‘cancel culture’ not being a manifestation of mob-like scapegoating? You lost me there. Score one for RG on that one. Because however weak the actual penalty of it may be, part of Girard’s thesis is that the reward of scapegoating is as much about the catharsis it delivers to the participants, and that sure seems to be part of what drives it, whatever political or cultural angle it comes from.
one claim Girard makes is that, post Christianity, the mechanism doesn’t work as well because everyone knows deep down the victim is innocent, or at least the victimization is excessive.
...Well that's just wrong. If they were that self-aware, they would be far more reluctant about cancelling people. These people aren't willingly evil, they really are trying to be good people. They're just really bad at it.
No, it seems quite accurate. The woke types are not relieved when their allegations against someone they're trying to cancel are proven wrong, they're actively saddened and disappointed.
Presumably actually executing a witch with your own hands would induce greater catharsis than just causing a witch to delete their Twitter account or lose their job.
Maybe it's because they don't get to kill them anymore. Seeing someone lose their job temporarily just isn't as satisfying as seeing them clubbed to death.
i think its an unexpected benefit of being a shallow, rootless society. We hate shallower too. you get the five minutes hate because we dont have the roots that can delay it, but when it finally breaks in a rooted society it is much worse.
Right. It's not like cancelling people tends to tone down culture war rhetoric. To me, this just seems like good ol' fashioned heretic hunting, fun for all ages, but only if you're on the side doing the hunting.
Maybe I'm not understanding catharsis or maybe I just don't hang around mobs, but I don't know of any cancellation people generally felt good about, post cancelling. Usually after someone fucks up and is Held Accountable, everyone involved just seems a) sad and exhausted b) embarrassed c) still blood thirsty. I don't think I've ever seen someone go "ah that was such good justice!! good job guys! we did it!"
Perhaps because there's no criminal penalty for most of this stuff and therefore no meaningful punishment. Not that I want there to be a punishment for wrongthink, but it seems that the lack of catharsis can be directly attributed to the lack of defining comeuppance.
You can also track the lack of harsh punishment to a large segment of the society (likely a majority) that doesn't want there to be any punishment. So whatever catharsis you would get from all of society pronouncing judgement is defrayed and there's no unity or consensus formed out of it.
As evil as it was, at least the Nazis seemed to agree to scapegoat the Jews and their other targets. Maybe this stuff doesn't work unless it's thorough.
ETA - not to in any way support the Nazis or say that they were on to something. If anything the fact that the Nazis used it effectively is another reason not to use it.
I'm not a Girardian, so I don't exactly want to defend Girard, but I do think one can steelman his perspective on the woke a bit more than Scott has done.
The idea is that Judeo-Christian concern for victims, however imperfect, was sincere; whereas the modern, ideological tendency is actually a bid for power, justified as concern for victims. Girard might point to Communist regimes and say, OK, they talk a good game about the workers, but were workers actually treated net better in Communist countries than capitalist? Wasn't the "dictatorship of the proletariat" mostly "dictatorship" and not so much "of the proletariat?" Depending on one's sympathies, one might have similar thoughts about the woke. Girard would also want to unpack this in psychological terms much more than either Scott or I have done here.
I think this is factually false. When woke people say they are "literally shaking", they are literally literally shaking. I know this because I am their psychiatrist and it really does cause them psychological harm to have to think about / deal with the sorts of things wokeness is against.
You can always come up with some galaxy-brained theory for how it's an unconscious civilization-wide bid for power even though on a conscious individual level they're genuinely concerned and unhappy, but I think strong versions of that are false, at least in a sense where any version that succeeds would also be strong enough to "prove" that nobody had ever been altruistic about anything.
Are you familiar with Freddie deBoer's new book, "How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement"?
I only listened to one of his podcasts, and I haven't yet read the book. But as I understand it, one of his main theses is that there's a disconnect between what most woke activists are fighting for and what the people they are ostensibly helping actually want. For example, most Black people are not in favor of defunding the police.
It's plausible to me that the average woke person is sincere in wanting to help victims, but that the people directing the movement have other motives.
As a Christian myself, I may be biased. But I think most Christian nonprofits have a better track record of actually helping people than the Black Lives Matter movement does. Do you disagree?
I was mostly thinking of "the people directing the movement", as applied to Christianity, of being eg bishops, Popes, Billy Graham, etc.
To answer your question, I think BLM is especially bad because it was created in response to a fake moral panic. But if you were to compare the average Christian nonprofit with the average liberal antiracist woke nonprofit (which I think would be, like, an inner city free clinic, or a Campaign To End Homelessness or something) I don't think there would be a big difference.
Also, I think "sincerely wants to help people" and "has a good track record of helping people" are very different, although I'm not sure which direction this advantages.
"compare the average Christian nonprofit with the average liberal antiracist woke nonprofit (which I think would be, like, an inner city free clinic, or a Campaign To End Homelessness or something) I don't think there would be a big difference."
I have a couple decades' experience working with both of those categories of nonprofit, without myself being part of either, and your impression is entirely right.
Campaigns To End Homelessness have a tendency to just become NGOs supporting themselves (how much does San Fran spend per homeless per year again?).
"Antiracist" being a term of art and "woke" being... something, not the best comparison either. But I get that bogging down in a definition argument is a distraction. I would venture even so that for there to be rough equivalence, we'd be comparing nonprofits that make an effort to be boots on the ground and food in hand, more than jargon-filled advertisements.
Can you explain what was/is fake about BLM? Are people of color not being discriminated against by the police?
I'm also confused regarding what "Woke" is supposed to be. Is it just white liberal paternalism? Or mob mentality? Because I'm not sure why those two things are necessarily connected. Or am I missing something?
I will point out that this particular example is rhetorical trickery.
People are against just decreasing funding and nothing else, but the 'Defund movement' has specific goals to spend that money on other types of community management processes that take over many of the current duties of the police and accomplish them without guns and prisons.
The polls saying that people ae against decreased funding are not offering that as an alternative.
My impression is that there's a lot of motte and bailey in this movement. "Oh, we don't actually want to defund the police, sorry for the silly naming, we just want more mental health treatment, etc." It's not convincing.
Defunding literally means 'reduce or withdraw funding', reducing funding is an entirely central use of the term, that *is* what they want, and then they want to use that extra money in the ways I described.
The 'sorry' here isn't the name being inaccurate, it's opponents intentionally misconstruing the definition of a word.
I think the Defund group lost a lot of goodwill and hurt themselves in two clear ways.
1. There are some people in the movement that literally meant 100% no funding for police. You can say the group was small or not in control, but they were and are real and make no qualms about their goals.
2. Lots of people in the movement actively put the cart before the horse, so to speak. They may have meant to channel those funds to mental health workers or whatever, but actual city councils were cutting police budgets with no plan to implement anything to replace it. The movement was using momentum from the BLM protests to get something done, and that was cutting police budgets. The work of getting something to replace it would have taken more time and effort, and instead of waiting to do it "right" by the metrics you are using, they instead chose to cut right away.
I wrote in another comment how wokeness is best understood as a religion. You are right, of course, that their actions are disconnected from their goals. But it's a mistake to conclude that they, or their leaders, are insincere about these goals. They are sincerely trying to create a better world - just not in a way that is focused on effective action (focusing instead on orthodoxy, on rites, and on communal worship). I guess it's hard for many readers of this blog to imagine that anyone would do that, but I think it describes the situation much better than conspiracy theories.
>When woke people say they are "literally shaking", they are literally literally shaking. I know this because I am their psychiatrist and it really does cause them psychological harm to have to think about / deal with the sorts of things wokeness is against.
Isn't there an obvious selection bias in that you're only seeing the subset of woke people neurotic enough to be seeing a therapist? If every Trump voter who attends AA meetings is an alcoholic, that doesn't remotely imply that every Trump voter is an alcoholic.
Also, even if we concede the point that all woke people experience literal psychic harm when reading anti-woke opinions, that doesn't imply that wokeness itself is motivated by sincere concern for victims.
If you've felt any of this rage yourself or known the people who feel it, it is clearly REAL, and common. There was no shortage of these people at my college and I dabbled myself, and I see no reason not to believe the case was the same everywhere.
"sincere concern" is hard to define though. It is a genuine rage at the qty of evidence of injustice, towards the same people, over and over. It is a completely sincere reaction to that information. It doesn't have much to do with victims DIRECTLY, it deals with the ideas of victims. Who ofc have some correspondence in the real world, often to people one DOES know.
but what abt the qty of evidence of injustice in communist or Muslim countries? or yt ppl being hunted in race riots? oh, does tht not matter bc the perps of it are not the group that we hate?
This is the whole point. If your ideological foundations are based on hatred of the good - order, civilization, freedom - then of course you will feel "sincere concern" at all those things. But that doesn't make you any less evil, because you are fully aware that your ideology stands for the destruction of those things. I'm sure there were high-ranking Nazis who were truly enraged by the existence of Jews, and genuinely wanted them to die.
I don't think the movement's ideological foundations are based on hatred of civilisation or freedom. Order's a trickier one, though it all depends on what is meant by "order"… but then it seems hard to imagine being pro-islamic fundamentalism and pro-Soviet totalitarianism while being passionately against order.
I think you err in looking for ideological foundations that would explain all woke positions. There aren't any. There are, simply, sympathetic foundations to the default attitude, and then a whole casuistic mess of arbitrary special cases, special pleading, and general abusive casuistry where one of the criteria for sympathy (usually, a group being pigenholed as victims of racism) short-circuits the thought process and prevents other lenses from being applied.
Put in practical terms, there simply isn't such a thing as a coherent political philosophy that simultaneously accounts for "queerphobia, sexism and enforced poverty are unacceptable, and we should campaign against them in all their forms as much as possible until anybody who believes in them relents", *and* for "we shouldn't criticize islamists or try to prevent them from enacting their political/societal aims". Of course there isn't. Your best attempts results in your modeling wokeists as misanthropic demons, but even that doesn't work. They're just fundamentally inconsistent for entirely understandable, non-evil reasons.
At heart they want maximum lifestyle freedom and comfort for all people, especially ones from demographics who've historically not had very much of either; they've accepted as an axiom that eradicating racism is necessary to get this; however "criticizing a belief system held primarily by non-white populations" looks racist; so they can't do that; so they can't criticize muslim fundamenlism. There's a crucial epistemological error somewhere around the 'you can't ever ever antagonize non-white populations' stage of reasoning, but no hatred of freedom is involved, just an earnest love of freedom combined with faulty reasoning and an unwillingness to acknowledge the resulting skewed result.
Agree with other reply to this re inconsistency, and I want to add: this comment section's reaction to Scott's treatment of "wokeness" is exposing a massive gulf in the characterization of what that movement is between, I think, people who learned about the underlying sentiments firsthand and were generationally sympathetic with the moral position if not the intellectual message, vs. on the other hand people whose main exposure to the movement is its late-stage and public-facing activity.
The latter, your view, I want to emphasize, *misunderstands completely*.
> If your ideological foundations are based on hatred of the good - order, civilization, freedom
"Woke" is not an ideology with ideological foundations. There is no "woke manifesto". It is a best thought of as a group of people who have taken in so much (basically true!) negative evidence against the belief that "western liberal capitalism is a just society" that they have entirely discarded this belief. For a large part, they took in this evidence during a "developmental stage" (I don't mean this in a bad way—just that people grow wiser and more capable with time) where they did not feel they had the power to do anything about it, so it all transmuted into rage and a feeling of powerlessness, such that the only thing one *could* do was agitate to convince the people who apparently DO have power and listen to these kinds of things, the middle class intelligentsia, to stop sleepwalking and take on responsibility for them.
> 'hatred of the good - order, civilization, freedom'
Not founded on at all—arrived at, because what you take to be "the good" has so much negative evidence piled on it that it's sunk into the sea, and because the virtues of that "good" always turn up as arguments *against* the things the woke movement is upset about. But this "good" seems to be insufficient to make the awfulness of the world go away, so why should we believe it's good? This, to be clear, is the right conclusion given the body of evidence they're working with. It's the methods that are immature, including the method of discarding all norms of civility to express the magnitude of your rage.
The right thing to do about it is to allow that they're making their point badly but take the emotional-moral call that our present society is fundamentally unjust, and do something about that on the basis of better principles. (E.g. New Deal welfare being institutionalized on the basis of liberal rights moreso than socialist solidarity.)
> a group of people who have taken in so much (basically true!) negative evidence against the belief that "western liberal capitalism is a just society"
Compared to what? Is there some hypothetical state of "absolute justice" that is being compared against? Western capitalism has produced the most "just" societies the world has ever seen, so these complaints are nonsense when compared to other regions of the world and other periods of history - and if you disagree, then your definition of "just" is based on fundamentally evil things. For example, if you see "inequality" as a great evil that must be minimized, regardless of the unbelievable benefits that it has brought to the world, you are a fundamentally rotten and evil person who wants to see the world burn out of pure jealousy.
> this "good" seems to be insufficient to make the awfulness of the world go away
I think I see why humanities students love this stuff so much - they just can't do math. When you have 350 million people in the country and 8 billion people in the world, if your standard for "awfulness of the world" is that every day in the news you can find at least one terrible atrocity that has happened, then of course you will think that the world is awful. Because even if the world is extremely good, by nature of having so many people, it's trivial to find at least one terrible thing to fill the news cycle with every single day.
> The right thing to do about it is to allow that they're making their point badly but take the emotional-moral call that our present society is fundamentally unjust, and do something about that on the basis of better principles
So, reward the communists?
The right thing to do is to crush them with all our might, and push for societies with the precise opposite of what they want - more freedom, capitalism, inequality, order, hierarchy, and human flourishing.
I have absolutely no idea what either razor has to do with my comment. I never suggested that every woke person was secretly a complete sociopath carefully manipulating society. Scott asserted that we know that woke people are motivated by sincere concern for society's victims because they are "literally shaking" on the couch in his office, and I pointed out that that logic doesn't follow: the fact that someone is literally shaking doesn't in and of itself prove that they care about group X or group Y.
Occam's razor suggests that it's more likely that any very large group of people is mostly filled with normal people instead of compulsive liars, and Hanlon's razor suggests that these people aren't willingly evil, just stupid.
Also, what do you even mean by "care" or "sincere concern"? If I saw someone bleeding out on the street, I would help them because 1. seeing people in pain makes me feel bad, and 2. I would feel bad if I didn't help them. Does that mean I "care" about them, or am I simply acting out of self-interest? Even though there is no such thing as true altruism, our innate empathy is what motivates us to help others, even when there's no obvious benefit. Empathy also makes us feel the pain of others as if it was our own... If feeling empathy for others doesn't count as caring about them, then nothing does.
>Occam's razor suggests that it's more likely that any very large group of people is mostly filled with normal people instead of compulsive liars, and Hanlon's razor suggests that these people aren't willingly evil, just stupid.
I wasn't talking about a "very large group of people". I was talking about the handful of woke people that Scott sees in his psychiatric practice who are "literally shaking" as a result of encountering contrary opinions.
Your second paragraph has literally nothing to do with anything I was saying.
Note that Occam's razor is meant as a very rough heuristic to use when you have absolutely no other evidence to go on, not anywhere near a law. It has nothing to do with "the simplest explanation" as is commonly misquoted - it simply recommends that if you have two competing theories with exactly the same explanatory power, you choose the one that is simpler, in information-theoretic terms, solely to avoid the unnecessary overhead of the more complex theory. (It makes no judgement about the likelihood of either theory). There is also absolutely no evidence in favor of Occam's razor, and there is quite a bit of evidence against it (see: physics).
My abusive & narcissistic ex had genuine feelings for me & even believed that what he loved was me rather than having me around as a symbol of his own value. He was always asserting his concern for my best interests, particularly when it aligned with his own desires, & projected the perfect image of the doting boyfriend. But he certainly didn't care about my actual well-being, as he regularly endangered my life by choking me into unconsciousness instead of engaging with my complaints about his constant chasing of increasingly younger side girls whom he'd convinced would replace me as one & only just as soon as he could figure out how to remove me from his house. Of course, when I finally did leave, he used all manner of threats to attempt to force me to return, even against his own family members with whom I was staying. His proceeded to fall into a deep pit of the genuine pain he was feeling at my departure, which eventually developed into a hateful obsession that has plagued all of his subsequent relationships. None of his very REAL feelings meant that he had ever actually cared about ME. I have heard that he continues demonizing me to anyone he sleeps with more than once as the ultimate succubus that ruined his innocent admiration of womankind & left him cynical of love.
A criminal steals someone's car and later gets caught.
"Hey, why did you steal my car!? What's wrong with you?"
"Oh, sorry, I just thought it was my car. My bad, I'm just an idiot, so there's no need to call the police or anything. Haven't you heard of Hanlon's razor?"
Hanlon's razor was deliberately crafted to give evil people an excuse to get away with their evil deeds. It treats adults like children, and excuses the worst of our society of their evil deeds on the basis that they just didn't know better. Humans are smart, and they almost always know better.
A modified version I might be more willing to accept is "Never attribute to extreme, calculated, psychopathic malice that which is adequately explained by basic run-of-the-mill malice motivated by greed, hatred, and revenge."
It's almost like these people have never experienced reality beyond the maze of walls that must be maintained to have the luxury of even contemplating the expansion of circles of concern. But the curtain of civility is fragile veil & under the right circumstances could evaporate right before our very eyes.
A less galaxy-brained theory: If people get rewarded for something, they do more of it. If being overly dramatic gets them what they want, they'll be overly dramatic more often. Some of them eventually get too into the act and start literally literally shaking in their psychiatrist's office.
I think it's also that people are largely sort of dumb* and think by popularity/unexamined feelings. That is, they see all the cool people saying how XYZ should make you feel ABC, and they internalize this so that when XYZ happens they know to act like ABC — and probably really do feel, to some extent, the attendant emotions.
I'm not sure I wanna go into detail, because then we'll start arguing about the example, but I went through something widely regarding as a Big Deal™ for a kid to go through — but I didn't know that, and it's never really bugged me, then or now.
(Conversely, I had a friend from Nigeria who loved computers, his classes, and America... until some of the staff started telling him probably he wasn't wanted at such a white school and it must be hard and does he need special treatment etc etc...
(Nearly dropped out before either I convinced him or he saw for himself — mostly the latter I think but I want some credit for trying okay — that no, no one was, say, mispronouncing his name *out of hatred.* Now he's a happy Red Teamer who makes more than I do, damn him!)
------------------------------
*You may think I'm just dunking on normies because I'm a vengeful nerd. Not so, my friends; no, it's because I have to send emails and make phone calls to normies all day every day — and you would not fucking believe how easy it is to lose them.
e.g., I keep having weird disjointed conversations with people because I try to say something with >2 parts and they can't chain them together past that. I've given up on conditionals altogether — give them ONE thing at a time, and only move to the next once YOU choose the requisite branch.
These people can barely even read, for Chrissake...
Perhaps the mechanism is domestication. If we start with a wolf, domestication seems good for a long time. One day a Chihuahua is literally shaking for no reason and a dawning sense of horror informs us that perhaps wolves weren't really so bad.
"When woke people say they are "literally shaking", they are literally literally shaking."
I imagine the most sensitive of them are, the kind of well-meaning and well-intentioned people you encounter, the ones who have to check under the bed every night in case Trump is lurking there, who read and believe the "New Fascism is on the rise, Trump blatantly planning to be Literal Hitler when he wins next election" pieces already coming out in the media.
But I think in the wider fetid swamp of hot takes on social media, there are a lot of people who aren't shaking but who know what lingo to use in order to "see my KoFi, Kickstarter, Patreon, Venmo me money" activate the readers.
I was already thinking about the types who go "Well Ackshully Aztec human sacrifice wasn't that bad! Sacrificial victims were honoured and treated exceptionally well! The people selected thought it was an honour and they were devout in their participation in the religion! In short - Spanish conquistadors wicked evil bad, and anything they said about human sacrifice wrong!"
And I'm going "No, people damn well didn't love the notion of being selected to be victims. The Aztecs genuinely believed it was necessary, but part of the reason so many subject and 'allied' kingdoms helped the Spanish was because they hated being part of this, not because they wanted 'No no, we love and cherish the idea of being honoured victims' to remain". The Conquistadors may indeed have been wicked evil bad, but they replaced the ribcages cracked open and hearts cut out, the child-victims for the rain god beaten so they would weep in order to evoke the sympathetic magic of rain fall, the priests dressing in the flayed skins of the victims - all to keep the natural world existing and working - with the once-for-all sacrifice of the God who died for you.
Catharsis is a good explanation for the unity in the wake of the bout of violent explosion of emotion and tension and mob psychology when the scapegoat victim is sacrificed, literally *or* symbolically as with cancel culture. Look at the 'spirit of the Blitz' or the immediate wake of 9/11 for a violent event bringing about national unity and the burial of differences in common sense of group cohesion.
> there are a lot of people who aren't shaking but who know what lingo to use in order to "see my KoFi, Kickstarter, Patreon, Venmo me money" activate the readers.
I also know marketing people who are doing this for corporations and they aren’t unconsciously doing it as a bid for power, they’re consciously doing it and saying they’re using this language for marketing purposes.
Aren’t the readers the ones who are shaking then? This seems a bit like arguing cigarettes aren’t really addictive by pointing out that the actors in the ads aren’t even really smokers.
The sorts of people who literally shake at stuff probably don't become powerful politicians. Perhaps it is only the leaders who are insincere, and they take advantage of the neurosis of the woke masses.
This could be either opportunistic or a deliberate plot in which they encourage the neurosis on purpose, depending on how far into conflict theory territory you want to go.
Sociopathic leaders can’t explain wokeness though; almost tautologically they don’t care what ideology they’re using. So why are they using wokeness now, instead of Naziism or Sikhism or whatever, unless it’s arisen genuinely and independently?
Nazism is out of fashion. Most people already know it's a trap, so from the sociopathic leader's perspective it's "used up".
If woke stuff ever gets out of fashion, neurotic people will find something else to literally shake about and sociopaths will find another niche to fill.
See Adam's comment on Goodharting, which I agree with.
I don't doubt that woke people who report psychological pain are actually experiencing psychological pain. I don't doubt that they are sincere in this immediate subjective sense. I also don't doubt that Lenin, who murdered millions, was sincere in this immediate subjective sense.
I don't think it takes anything close to a galaxy-brained theory to understand that power over others is a basic human drive and can manifest itself in social interactions at various level, some of them disguised, even to oneself. I think we literally see this at work in social interactions –– interpersonally, online, politically –– every single day.
I believe there is a mundane, common-sense version of the above that doesn't require you to be a Freudian, Nietzschean, Girardian, or anything fancy at all.
Seems like whenever a belief system, religious or otherwise, achieves normative dominance in a particular community, you'll find in that community:
- people who believe sincerely and deeply
- people who believe in a superficial and unreflective way
- people who don't belive
- people who are ambivalent
...among the less believing and non believing groups, many will go along anyway, some just enough to check the box and be left alone, more or less grudgingly, like the famous greengrocer, others with a great deal of false enthusiasm, for the sake of their own advantage, and still others will go along for the sake of recruiting true believers into more altruistic projects
...among the true believers, some will channel their anxieties and neuroses through the beliefs, some will channel their megalomania or narcissism through the beliefs
...many individuals will fit several of these descriptions and the same time and/or sequietially, and you'll find all types at every level, from the rank and file to the highest inner circles
Again, this seems to hold true across a wide variety of communities/belief systems.
I get to observe DEI up close in a real institution. To me it looks like mostly intra-elite status games. I'm sure some of the people playing the games literally shake and cry about social injustices in therapy, and some dont.
Huh.... I've actually never even considered the possibility that someone saying "literally shaking" might be literally shaking. It's always seemed like such over the top melodrama, especially given the benign contexts I've heard it being used in.
One person is literally shaking; hundred people saw this person and now they pretend to be him; thousand people write "I am shaking" because they see that this is what everyone else is writing.
"A moral panic is a widespread feeling of fear, often an irrational one, that some evil person or thing threatens the values, interests, or well-being of a community or society.[1][2][3] It is "the process of arousing social concern over an issue",[4] usually perpetuated by moral entrepreneurs and mass media coverage, and exacerbated by politicians and lawmakers.[1][4] Moral panic can give rise to new laws aimed at controlling the community.[5]"
I really like the Wiki definition here and how it differentiates the roles of different folks during the moral panic.
Heck, I was literally literally shaking just reading this piece, but from the other side, from having to deal with wokeness. You are, I assume, familiar with the theory that the attitudes behind wokeness involve anti-CBTing yourself into having (more) trauma?
I mentioned below that these sort of open-ended ethical commitments provide free energy, gated by imperfect legibility, incentivizing agents to claim that energy by shaping themselves into something that appears to the imperfect perception as a deserving recipient. Putting aside culture war and current events, I also worry about how this will affect future iterations of AI.
Wokeness is a religion, much like catholicism. Its proponents are sincere. But they focus not on effective action to alleviate suffering, but on correct beliefs (orthodoxy). This is why they devote so much attention to heretics like J. K. Rowling, who broke with woke orthodoxy. They also value rites like recycling and communal worship like pro-Palestine demonstrations, where their priests give sermons and the laity joins in communal chants that help bind the community together. You go off track if you try to understand wokeness in secular rationalist terms.
<i>You can always come up with some galaxy-brained theory for how it's an unconscious civilization-wide bid for power even though on a conscious individual level they're genuinely concerned and unhappy,</i>
Is it really that galaxy-brained? Motivated reasoning is a well-known phenomenon. Think of, say, a guy whose wife is obviously cheating on him, but who manages to convince himself that she's actually faithful. It doesn't seem at all weird or implausible to say that on a conscious level he genuinely thinks his wife's been loyal, but unconsciously he can't bear the shame of being a cuckold. When it comes to political views, I don't see any implausibility in supposing that a person, or even a large number of people, is consciously sincere in his beliefs, but unconsciously wants to legitimate his feelings of resentment towards those who seem to be better-off.
<i>at least in a sense where any version that succeeds would also be strong enough to "prove" that nobody had ever been altruistic about anything.</i>
The fact that the wokest spaces also tend to be among the most unpleasant -- the most censorious, most given to purity spirals, etc. -- should make us more sceptical about wokeness' claims to altruism.
> When woke people say they are "literally shaking", they are *literally literally* shaking. I know this because I am their psychiatrist and it *really does cause them psychological harm* to have to think about / deal with the sorts of things wokeness is against.
Wait, I understand this might be obnoxious but I really can’t tell from your phrasing. Have you actually observed your patients having involuntary, repetitive muscle contractions causing tremulous motions of the body due to above mentioned thoughts, or are you just using “literally shaking” in the sense of “disturbed emotionally”?
And when you say “think about / deal with the sorts of things wokeness is against”, where does that fall on the scale from “they were beaten by five skinheads because they were black” to “they saw a non-Mexican wearing a sombrero”?
Isn't another difference that Christian morality is, almost by definition, voluntary, while "woke" morality is codified in rules and enforced--either by "the mob" or by the government. When we are coerced into being kind, we are not really being kind.
This feels pretty No True Scotsman to me given that Christianity has been codifying and enforcing standards of behavior on people for most of its history.
And heck if you take Christian doctrine at face value it involves enforcing a specific set of beliefs on people under threat of eternal torment so I'm not sure how you could call that really voluntary.
I don't think this is a legitimate distinction. Christian morality has only been "voluntary" for about the last five minutes of human history. Prior to that it was the state religion in most countries in the Americas, Europe, Oceania and large parts of Africa. In most of these countries, official state-run schools educated children explicitly in accordance with the dictates of a Christian faith (the US is quite the outlier in Western countries for separation of church and state). Numerous countries banned "Monty Python's Life of Brian" on its initial release in the 1970s on the grounds that it was blasphemous, and blasphemy is still a crime in many Christian nations.
And to the extent that churches did that, they were very similar to the "wokerati" of today. "Moral busybodies" as CS Lewis called this type. There is nothing in the bible that condones this, though. Real Christian faith--and any charitable behaviour that stems from it-- MUST be freely given.
> Christian morality is, almost by definition, voluntary
What? If you don't do the right thing you are tortured for eternity. And in the temporal world for most of the time that Christianity was dominant going against it meant you were, at best, a social outcast, at worst firewood
I am a thorough-going atheist, and this sort of reasoning is what, in my youth, took me there. But in the decades since, I have been exposed to the thinking of lots of Christian intellectuals whose take is much more nuanced—Hell is separation from God and is entirely due to the volition of the individual who has spurned God. C S Lewis describes this at length, but you can see traces of it even back in Marlowe’s Faustus, in which Mephistopheles says, when asked about Hell, says *this* is Hell, and he’s never out of it.
It doesn’t convince me, but it makes me unwilling to indulge in straw-men.
Come to think of it, under this interpretation there could be a dozen mutually hostile deities, all threatening their non-followers with separation from deity[index_i#], all being perfectly correct about this, and none of the followers of deity[index_i#] being one whit concerned about separation from all deity[index_j# != index_i]. It has an appealing (to me) symmetry and humor.
Agreed, though Jesus was perhaps talking to people who were less nuanced than C S Lewis. And this was in the context of cutting off a hand that offends you, which was surely not meant to be taken literally.
Not so much a "bid for power," but "a corrupted, Goodhart's law-ified zombie version of the original concern." A thing called "victimhood" has been selected as a measure of goodness. We want to be good, therefore we must find and support "victimhood." This incentivizes a dilution and instrumentalization of "victimhood", makes it easier for the entire system to get hijacked by charlatans and cynical operators, and privileges appearance and image (i.e. being seen to be doing good) over actual substance.
Yes - and I think this is how you get the recurring pattern (seen here as well) of SA (not to single him out, this is so commonplace) of any piece on any subject touching ethical or social matters having an obligatory "take racism, well we can agree racism is pretty bad, right?" moment.
[I'm going to skip the part where I avow, for safety's sake, that racism is bad, within this comment, lest we get all Droste-cocoa-y.]
There are many behaviors that are bad, but in some fashion we have reduced sin to one behavior, cringingly so. I mean, the example is never "take hostility, take cruelty to children, take gluttony, take meanness, take sloth, take sexual incontinence, take dishonesty, take violence ..."
I am not sure why racism was chosen. When you put it next to, say, murder, it seems a lesser bad - undesirable - and something to which the best among us are immune - but a possibly ineradicable part of human nature, especially as the definition shifts to more and more anodyne behavior. I think you could have a society where people were governed by the morality we've discarded, and still feel whatever they feel or think whatever they think regarding The Other - which may be hardwired in the brain - and things could go pretty well, maybe even better than they do at present. Because rules for conduct recognize human fallibility and try to mitigate it, not posit a utopia of shiny minds.
I think of an anecdote I heard one time. It concerned my Southern in-laws - people you would surely deem racist for a) having lived in the time of segregation; b) being one of the few white families in a small black town, and thus giving employment to blacks from a position of greater wealth; c) having been aware of racial differences though not alarmed about them, or feeling that they required a great deal of social engineering; and d) not having hated the South in which they lived, nor thought it particularly more broken or bad than the rest of the country.
So - racists, in current parlance.
A relative had married a man from *elsewhere*, and he was visiting the house, and there was some question about some or other thing that needed to be done, I don't remember what.
The visitor said something along the lines of "well, why don't you just get a couple of n*****s" to do whatever.
Frosty silence. They were too polite to confront him over this solecism, but they never forgot it, as when this man's name came up decades later, this anecdote was all that surfaced; and it fixed him in their mind as not merely vulgar but Not Their Sort. And their distaste for him was not merely due to their own sensibilities, but a genuine dismay that people they cared about, who worked in the house, might have heard him.
Yes, I agree with this formulation. Goodharting is how this actually comes to pass over time -- but also, it's a psychologically internalized Goodharting.
Yeah, it provides free energy to the system, gated by imperfect legibility, incentivizing agents to claim that energy by shaping themselves into something that appears to the imperfect perception as "a victim".
>but were workers actually treated net better in Communist countries than capitalist?
This isn't as obvious as it might seem at first glance. Homelessness and joblessness were very low in the USSR, and average calories consumed (a decent measure of the conditions of the very-worst-off) was higher than the USA's for much of its history.
It wasn't some shining paradise, but outside of Stalin it wasn't completely awful either (in much of the former Eastern Bloc, the Communist Parties are still around and still get non-negligible support; look up Die Linke for an example, even though it's collapsed recently). It was kind of mediocre.
'Homelessness and joblessness were very low in the USSR, and average calories consumed (a decent measure of the conditions of the very-worst-off) was higher than the USA's for much of its history.'
1) These are incredibly low bars for a European country in the 20th century
2) Average calories consumed is not, in fact a decent measure of the conditions of the very worst off. All developing countries have abandoned this measure because as economies develop even to per capita incomes well below those of the USSR, average calories consumed actually drop, and significantly so
And
3) All data that emerged from the USSR, on which you're basing these statements, has proven to be deeply suspect
> as economies develop even to power capita [per capita?] incomes well below those of the USSR, average calories consumed actually drop, and significantly so
If you can't fault your opponents acts because they are good acts, then make up secret sinister unverifiable motives for those acts and fault those instead.
This is certainly the strategy at play with calling everyone on the right racist and sexist and etc. Good to see that both sides make use of it.
Of course, these are human dynamics, not pathologies unique to some particular group of "bad people." And understanding these dynamics does not free one from the need to evaluate particular actors and tendencies. Facts matter, a lot.
But it's naive merely to say, "Person X experiences psychological pain, therefore their concerns should be taken entirely at face value, end of story."
This shit (NOT the review, that's great, Girad's book itself) needs to be exiled from academia or clearly labeled as wild speculation rather than serious argument. Maybe some ideas in here are worth exploring or it's aesthetically worthwhile but the same can be said for novels yet we all recognize the danger in calling a work of fiction, no matter how good, non-fiction.
It's an interesting suggestion but that's just a few paragraphs -- the problem is the pretense that everything else in the book constitutes an argument that means it warrants serious consideration. It's not harmless and fun or interesting exploration -- it's pretending that the use of methods of analogical and incautious reasoning that we have piles of evidence are misleading are worthwhile. Ultimately, the value in a subject is as much (probably more) about it's ability to exclude bad work as to sanctify good work. When we allow badly reasoned crap like Girad to be passed off as valuable philosophy we undermine our whole epistemic system. Doesn't matter if his conclusion is correct or not the method is fundamentally unreliable and the constant game so many academics play to hide this fact is deeply disturbing.
The standard reaction when I object to this kind of work to people at philosophy conferences is to either point to some value this stuff has in inspiring ideas or an appeal to the same kind of cultural appreciation we have for novels.
But if that's really the reason then nothing is lost if we just make it super clear that there are wild trippy speculations and serious philosophical arguments and clearly label them as such -- use less prejorative terms if you want just make them stick. Sure, there will be edge cases but label the clear ones.
The very fact that people object strongly to this gives away the game. The reason this kind of stuff is seen as valuable is because it borrows credibility from the serious part of the subject -- and that's the problem.
--
Sure, if you don't think philosophy serves any purpose other than elite entertainment it doesn't matter. But then I expect you to shut up about it's importance when you look for funding and support. OTOH if you really believe that philosophy serves this important role in helping people understand the world and avoiding mistakes allowing shit like this to masquerade as if the same kind of thing is a big problem.
I wouldn't go that far. I think there can be a place for quite wild speculation and weak argument. This speculation is pretty unconvincing but it's worth reviewing to appreciate that.
But it's really important this not be treated as anything but speculation by giving it the moniker of more academic credibility.
I mean I wouldn't have bothered to read and review it but I mean if the alternative was just the reviewer reading a novel well then at least we learn it's as unconvincing as we expected.
Sorry, not quite following. He doesn't need to be punished he merely needs to not be given the authority of academic respectability -- no different than the status for any other author.
Step 1: everyone in the land of "academia" wants the good hair: physicists want to be like mathematicians, economists have physics envy, social scientists succumb to economic imperialism and so forth. Everyone wants rigor and "serious argument", few can afford it. You get among the disciplines many copies of each other.
Step 2: The "epistemic system" is in crisis. Maybe partially because of "badly reasoned crap" but much more so because of an avalanche of mind-numbing, ill-conceived incrementalism: academics write grant applications in which they somehow are supposed to already know the results they will obtain; they proudly wear their good hair applying unsuitable but ostensibly rigorous methods to ever more domains; empiricists get the replication crisis for their troubles and theorists find themselves constructing maths-monstrosities to deal with a special case of a special case of the special theory of special niche phenomenon. Mostly they are "basically pleasant bureaucrats" but sometimes they allow themselves to despair for a few moments, wondering what happened to the young person who wanted to tackle big questions.
Step 3: Gotta exile the contrarian obscurantist necromancer (Con): "This shit needs to be exiled from academia or clearly labeled as wild speculation rather than serious argument. (...) When we allow badly reasoned crap like Girad to be passed off as valuable philosophy we undermine our whole epistemic system. Doesn't matter if his conclusion is correct or not the method is fundamentally unreliable and the constant game so many academics play to hide this fact is deeply disturbing."
Step 4 & 5: Once the Con and his seductive continental ideas have been exiled and quarantined, we can enjoy them guilt-free! Let's have two regalia: "serious philosophical arguments" and "wild trippy speculations". Nothing wrong with the latter, in fact maybe we should be less pejorative and call it "religion".
I don't see how this doesn't end up applying to all distinctions drawn everywhere? Anytime we need to exert effort to maintain some clear distinction one side of the distinction will be seen as higher status than the other (tho most of the world goes the other way on religion).
I mean, how does this not apply with equal force to the physicist working for a publisher who rejects the great Gatsby's publication as a work of physics?
--
More technically, I'd say that to take this notion seriously you must believe there is a principled distinction between failing to grant some on net beneficial status and punishment or every distinction becomes an instance of punishment and the concept becomes kinda useless.
It certainly sounds like one of these things it's easy to internally confuse the sentiment "it certainly *would* be interesting if the world *did* work like this" with "yes, that's how the world *does* work" - a thought pattern that I believe that all too commonly seduces people to believe in and advocate all sorts of nonsense.
Yes, but that's true of many things. But usually academic standards work to keep this fallacy at bay but see my other comment for a long discussion of the particular way this hacks those norms
(short version -- understanding it requires you invest mental work so you feel like you've done something of intellectual worth and you're invested in it and read in your spin. Then because of this if you challenge the value it's easy to dismiss you as not having really understood it -- because the critic realizes that requiring lots of effort to decode decreases epistemic value but in effect this gets turned on its head.)
A book that starts off with ancient myths and later wends its way to Nietzche is pretty much gauranteed to become a bullshit geyser in the final section.
I don't know anything about this book beyond Scott's review, but I don't understand your objection.
Either you're complaining that philosophy is not based in science (you refer to lack of evidence), or you're complaining specifically about continental philosophy that is unclearly and non-rigorously argued.
If the former, well that's what philosophy is. Far from being a subset of science, science started as a subset of philosophy. Now it's separated, leaving philosophy to deal with non-evidential matters of a prioroi thought. Unless you've figured out a way the scientific method can answer questions like "why trust the scientific method" and "how can you be sure the external world is real" (which would itself require philosophy) I don't see how one can object to that.
If the latter, well I find it very annoying as well but that's the deliberate style of the whole tradition. Writing vaguely and "artistically" instead of rigorously does allow for the expression of many kinds of arguments, ideas, connections, and processes that couldn't be easily expressed otherwise. And in any case, if it's a deliberate style (which it is) it's not a failure.
The objection is to the second and my complaint is in some sense really with analytic philosophers who allow continental style philosophy to be regarded as if it was part of the same project of truth discovery. I don't care what name who gets but you can't treat them as part of the same project.
It's no different than if physics started allowing theologians to start working in their departments and call themselves physicists and then when the issue was raised just say: well that's their tradition. You are misleading the undergrads who really don't understand that Nietzsche isn't even the same sort of thing as Carnap (just as they'd be mislead if they went to a class called physics 200 and were lectured about theology in a way that was vaguely continuous with QM).
Besides, I don't think your defense of the continental philosophy as 'thats their tradition' holds up. If that's all that was going on they'd stand up and say: "no no, we aren't in that buisness of establishing truth via reasoning we're engaged in this other literary project." If you ask them what they are doing they'll insist they are discovering what's true and indeed many if not most will claim to actually be a superior method to analytic philosophy. If that's not enough to say: nope sorry that's just bad methodology then the same defense could be used for astrology or really any practice.
Ultimately, my sense is that 'continental' philosophy is stealing legitimacy from other parts of philosophy and if it was was really cut loose I think it would gradually just be merged in people's minds with the vague confusing theories in English/etc and not be taken too seriously.
--
Besides, philosophy, as the subject which is tasked (or at least does) act as a kind of reasoning police butting into other disciplines to question the validity of practices in physics, to raise methodological worrier re: replication crisis etc has a particularly strong burden here. If you aren't dedicated to trying to actually improve the reasoning ability of UGs then stop claiming that's what you are doing -- and I see in actual philosophy papers that UGs reasoning is very much made worse by the fact they don't realize that reading Nietzsche in one class is a totally different subject than the analytic class.
if the people engaged in "continental" philosophy (since the label is a matter of dispute) were
In what sense is 'continental' philosophy not just bad philosophy? Is it just that it's traditional? We'd never accept that response as a reason to allow homeopaths to keep publishing studies without controls in the medical literature. We'd judge that having a bunch of people refuse to accept the importance of the placebo effect didn't make them correct. And the same holds true if some recalcitrant branch of mathematicians had resisted the revolution in formalism and insisted on continuing to publish the problematic proofs that lead to the paradoxes in early analysis.
So that gets to the fundamental question. Is philosophy a truth oriented discipline like medicine, physics or math? I believe it is and that means tradition is no defense for bad work.
Not a professional philosopher (and maybe that's a good thing in this context) but I got heavily exposed to continental philosophy from high school onwards and always maintained a deep interest in the subject afterwards. So take my point of view with a grain of salt. In my opinion as soon as you ask "is philosophy a truth oriented discipline like medicine" you are already on the wrong track. You have a model of how philosophy should or should not work and it's a model you base on empirical science, medicine in this case. You are swallowing whole an unproblematized, uncritical notion of truth and that's a non starter. The point of philosophy is to transcend this! What is even truth? It seems that you assume you know the answer, at least in a "I know it when I see it" fashion. With this premise, comparing philosophy to any other "truth oriented discipline" is a major exercise in missing the point. It's like assuming that all functions should be computable and then being like of course the busy beaver is not a function, right? It's not computable.
If you don't know what truth is than what's the difference between philosophy and astrology?
To put the point a bit less quipishly, once you accept that there are some things that ought to be judged as valid/valuable works of philosophy and others that aren't then you've adopted a metric just as I have. Pretending you haven't or there isn't a metric doesn't make it go away it just obscures what it is.
And that's the problem here. If you really want to just jettison the whole idea that some arguments are better or more justified than others you can't then turn around and defend a system that does exactly that. You're trying to have it both ways.
Everyone is applying some standard the question is just whether your standard is what's traditional or has a certain feel or if it's more clearly stated based on evidence that standard seems to yield good outcomes in the cases we can agree on value.
My understanding is that admitting that the notion of truth is problematic does not automatically engender a situation where we must accept every argument, no matter how devoid of internal consistency or empirical content. Philosophy is a social/dialogic exercise, where more than one person is involved; people will individually (and/or collectively) engage with an argument to ultimately accept it or reject/refine it. So rejecting a fixed, external notion of truth (whose universal acceptance would in my opinion inevitably either ossify philosophy or give rise to a new discipline restricted in object and method, similarly to what happened already countless times with the birth of physics, psychology, etc.) does not rule out the possibility of building/approximating such a notion dialectically.
Sure, I don't have an issue with saying truth is hard. Hell there is plenty of analytic content along those lines.
But notice you've implicitly accepted the goal is to produce better arguments and that we need to evaluate them based on some metric. Ok great, we can now try to figure out what that metric should be. All I mean by truth conducive in this context is that there are some things that seem appealing but aren't good reasons for belief and others that are and we want standards that favor the latter.
But you now have to give reasons and defend them for why the continental approach qualifies. You can't use the fact that you are trying to problematize the notion of truth as a means of avoiding the question of whether these are methodologically successful ways of doing so.
In general everywhere else we look being more explicit, giving clear definitions and being pedantic is judged to improve our ability to decide which arguments are better so I think of you want to jettison this idea you need an argument for why and you can't just say: well I'm problematizing that to avoid doing so.
Do you think there are arguments of a form someone like me would see as persuasive that justify the methodology in continental philosophy or do you think it's entirely justified on its own terms?
If you say the later I obviously can't convince you otherwise but it's rational for me to treat it exactly the way I do christian theology and you also shouldn't think I should be persuaded either. Just that I should accept different foundational values/epistemology.
A more SJW way of putting the point is that continental philosophy isn't jettisoning judgements of worth/truth it's just saying we value the kind of stuff that ticks the boxes of traditional status like engaging with statusful historical figures and having lots of footnotes.
When you get to the bottom the question is how do you pick the rule that distinguishes work that gets the imprintor of academic value from that which doesn't. The continental answer is: whatever flatters the kind of people who have tended to do this kind of thing in the past and went to grad school and I don't think that's a sufficent answer to justify the implicit request for public/alumni funding
See above; if the alternative to 'engaging with a statusful of historical figures and having lots of footnotes' is pretending that somehow we have access to a universal notion of truth or more generally to some universal, agreed upon method to pursue such truth, then we would just be swapping a (critical, dialectical) acceptance of the importance of past tradition for an (uncritical, dogmatic) acceptance of the importance of whatever ideology is dominant in $current_year.
What is your objection to Girard's proposition? I see a lot of yelling in this comment but nothing that tells me what you disagree with or why. You don't accept that "throughout history people often dealt with crisis by selecting a scapegoat or victim to blame for misfortunes and calamities (e.g. "the plague is because those Jews poisoned the wells!"), they gathered together in a mob and executed or drove out the selected victim; afterwards, they felt justified that they had behaved correctly because the victim was self-evidently evil or malign. Christianity took this narrative, but flipped it around that the victim was blameless and the mob at fault. Over the centuries, society took this idea, isolated it, exaggerated it, and now in modern society we have a Cult of Victimhood where everything is the fault of structural racism and the like"?
If not, why not? Where is the point of disagreement, what is your alternative view? All I am getting from your comment is "Girard is dumb, people who like him are dumb, everyone is dumb" but not *why* they're dumb.
To his proposition, nothing in particular. I mean if pushed my sense is that it's pretty vague, poorly defined and to the extent I understand it not something I'd assign a high prior to but his claim could be the sky is blue for all that it matters here.
What's relevant is that the book (you can read enough to get the sense on Google books) is quite a bad argument for his claims. But even still, if it was just a really long blog post it would just be another really unconvincing (if tediously long) blog post but there are plenty of Hanson's posts that I find unconvincing (if much clearer).
My objection is ultimately to the fact that works like this get treated like serious scholarship and I think that allows it to implicitly borrow credibility (TBF Girad himself isn't particularly studied in philosophy courses which is why I avoided the whole continental thing initially but it borrows credibility from the fact it's continuous with philosophy and that while philosophers would happily call out bad methods of reasoning in physics various incentives push them not to do so for this type of thing).
And yes the emotional ire is because I care about philosophy as a truth oriented subject which, just like math or physics, needs methodologies that help avoid errors in any work that wants to be taken academically seriously and works like this do the opposite and court methodologies we know to be error inducing and thus when people treat works like this as if they are serious scholarship continuous with philosophy (and I doubt anyone would take it seriously if it was a blog post) that threatens something I care about dearly.
...Did we read the same post? Scott made it very clear that all the arguments that connected the phenomenon to Christianity were complete bullshit. Scott's book reviews aren't endorsements; hell, most of them barely have anything to do with what's written in the book. They're just excuses to talk about interesting stuff. In this case, that thing is the *potential* connection between Christian slave mentality and the current "woke" culture.
And I'm not critisizing Scott. I don't think he is giving this author academic credibility. I like the review which is why I pushed back on the people who said it was worthless.
Indeed, I think Scott's review is exactly the sort of thing that's needed in academia -- if we had more of this (which is essentially the nice way of saying here's the idea but there just isn't a good argument here) and fewer people treating the work as having merit merely because it follows a certain tradition in presentation and argumentative style I'd be happy.
Ohh I see the confusion "This sort of shit" refers to Girad not the review.
I mean, Girard is clearly doing one of those "here is an extremely simple Pattern I have spotted that explains All of History; let me substantiate that by proposing a bunch of cherry-picked examples and discarding all the evidence to the contrary and then argue we must use the Pattern as a guide to the future" things. It's always, invariably, unerringly bad. Bad history, bad sociology, bad philosophy. In this case the specific Pattern is also more insane because it's pretty much all revolving around Girard's own specific religious pet peeves. "Christianity literally introduced the very ideas of victimhood/compassion/mercy/forgiveness to humanity" or such is a whole category of arguments that Christian apologists use to try and claim their religion is superior to all other philosophies, a very easily disproven argument at that if one takes a minimally critical look at pre-Christian literature and history and sees the precise same humans with the precise same wants and feelings as present day ones as far as the eye can see, though of course shaped by different material conditions and social structures. The "pre-Christian humanity could not even conceive of empathizing with victims" notion is as absurd as the "ancient Greeks literally could not see blue" one, and made of the same cloth. It's an extraordinary claim that would require extraordinary evidence and is instead merely substantiated with vague gesturing towards the Pattern, and this apparently is ok because "philosophy" is not a discipline that needs to hold itself to standards such as their arguments actually not contradicting our lying eyes and ears, as long as they're elegant enough.
In the wake of "are electrons real?" discourse on Twitter, if one wants to know why is it that so many scientists hold philosophy in such low regard, look no further than stuff like this. As Peter says, this is not academia, these are the rants of a nutjob, and should be treated by philosophy with the same attitude with which astronomers will treat someone claiming that Planet Nibiru is home to the Ancient Aliens who bootstrapped human civilization.
Okay, I think we need to pour some cold water on this debate to cool it down.
Let's look at what Girard is saying in light of Christianity as a *philosophy* and not a religion (and not fighting out its truth claims).
Also, Girard is talking about Western Civilisation which does derive (or claims to derive) from both the Classical World (Greece and Rome mainly) *and* Judaeo-Christian tradition.
So in the light of that, what makes Western society different? He's claiming (it seems) that we have taken one particular element of Christian belief, detached it from the context of the religion, secularised it, and made that the ruling ethic of our measure of progress: compassion for the victims.
I think I can agree with that, since the one thing I see constantly online when people are discussing everything that is (one might say) culture war is that atheists, agnostics, free thinkers, non-Christians, non-believers, and general secular types is "I thought you Christians were about love"? Nobody talks about the soul, the nature of the Trinity, etc. but "Jesus said love, right?" Love love love.
It's how the liberal Christians differentiate themselves from the traditional types: "Jesus never said anything about abortion/gay rights/trans/what have you!" but they're very quick off the bat to quote the texts about "love your neighbour", "love your enemy", "God is love" and so forth.
So charity/compassion/the valorisation of the victim and victimhood: the measure of progress in the Pinker sense of "things are getting better and better":
"Instead, [Pinker] argues that: "The way to explain the decline of violence is to identify the changes in our cultural and material milieu that have given our peaceable motives the upper hand."
Okay, so what made the West (and let's limit our range of enquiry to that) change from "you can seize your debtor's children and sell them as slaves" to where we are today, where "wokeness" is the Leviathan of our times?
"4 Now the wife of one of the sons of the prophets cried to Elisha, “Your servant my husband is dead, and you know that your servant feared the Lord, but the creditor has come to take my two children to be his slaves.” 2 And Elisha said to her, “What shall I do for you? Tell me; what have you in the house?” And she said, “Your servant has nothing in the house except a jar of oil.” 3 Then he said, “Go outside, borrow vessels from all your neighbors, empty vessels and not too few. 4 Then go in and shut the door behind yourself and your sons and pour into all these vessels. And when one is full, set it aside.” 5 So she went from him and shut the door behind herself and her sons. And as she poured they brought the vessels to her. 6 When the vessels were full, she said to her son, “Bring me another vessel.” And he said to her, “There is not another.” Then the oil stopped flowing. 7 She came and told the man of God, and he said, “Go, sell the oil and pay your debts, and you and your sons can live on the rest.”
It's not that ancient people have no notion of compassion or forgiveness or mercy, but that the circle to which it applied was limited (and we see that even today in the arguments over Effective Altruism being more concerned with the poor overseas than the needy at home). The argument is that Christianity moved that circle to wider and wider boundaries, from "my family/my clan/my neighbours/my tribe" to "anyone in need".
See the anti-slavery medallion of 1787: "Am I not a man and a brother":
The ancient world might well have agreed this person was a man, but a brother? Where did that notion come from? How is this man of another race my brother? In what sense can he claim a duty of family to him?
And that comes from principles like the Good Samaritan. It's important that it's a lawyer who poses the question "Who is my neighbour?" because it's a very lawyer-like query: give me a definition, back it up with evidence and precedent, delimit my duties and responsibilities exactly to exactly whom:
"25 And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” 26 He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” 27 And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” 28 And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”
29 But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
And the answer he is made to give, out of his own mouth, is:
"36 Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” 37 He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.”
The merciful man is my neighbour, and my mercy must extend to *everyone*.
That becomes a defining trait of Christianity; even Julian the Apostate complains about it as being how the Christians appeal to the pagan poor and lower classes, because they do what their own will not or do not do:
"22. To Arsacius, High-priest of Galatia [362, on his way to Antioch in June?]
The Hellenic religion does not yet prosper as I desire, and it is the fault of those who profess it; for the worship of the gods is on a splendid and magnificent scale, surpassing every prayer and every hope. May Adrasteia pardon my words, for indeed no one, a little while ago, would have ventured even to pray for a change of such a sort or so complete within so short a time. Why, then, do we think that this is enough, why do we not observe that it is their benevolence to strangers, their care for the graves of the dead and the pretended holiness of their lives that have done most to increase atheism? I believe that we ought really and truly to practise every one of these virtues. And it is not enough for you alone to practise them, but so must all the priests in Galatia, without exception. Either shame or persuade them into righteousness or else remove them from their priestly office, if they do not, together with their wives, children and servants, attend the worship of the gods but allow their servants or sons or wives to show impiety towards the gods and honour atheism more than piety. In the second place, admonish them that no priest may enter a theatre or drink in a tavern or control any craft or trade that is base and not respectable. Honour those who obey you, but those who disobey, expel from office. In every city establish frequent hostels in order that strangers may profit by our benevolence; I do not mean for our own people only, but for others also who are in need of money. I have but now made a plan by which you may be well provided for this; for I have given directions that 30,000 modii of corn shall be assigned every year for the whole of Galatia, and 60,000 pints of wine. I order that one-fifth of this be used for the poor who serve the priests, and the remainder be distributed by us to strangers and beggars. For it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galilaeans support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us. Teach those of the Hellenic faith to contribute to public service of this sort, and the Hellenic villages to offer their first fruits to the gods; and accustom those who love the Hellenic religion to these good works by teaching them that this was our practice of old. At any rate Homer makes Eumaeus say: "Stranger, it is not lawful for me, not even though a baser man than you should come, to dishonour a stranger. For from Zeus come all strangers and beggars. And a gift, though small, is precious." Then let us not, by allowing others to outdo us in good works, disgrace by such remissness, or rather, utterly abandon, the reverence due to the gods. If I hear that you are carrying out these orders I shall be filled with joy.
As for the government officials, do not interview them often at their homes, but write to them frequently. And when they enter the city no priest must go to meet them, but only meet them within the vestibule when they visit the temples of the gods. Let no soldier march before them into the temple, but any who will may follow them; for the moment that one of them passes over the threshold of the sacred precinct he becomes a private citizen. For you yourself, as you are aware, have authority over what is within, since this is the bidding of the divine ordinance. Those who obey it are in very truth god-fearing, while those who oppose it with arrogance are vainglorious and empty-headed.
I am ready to assist Pessinus if her people succeed in winning the favour of the Mother of the Gods. But, if they neglect her, they are not only not free from blame, but, not to speak harshly, let them beware of reaping my enmity also. "For it is not lawful for me to cherish or to pity men who are the enemies of the immortal gods." Therefore persuade them, if they claim my patronage, that the whole community must become suppliants of the Mother of the Gods."
The Jewish people look after their own poor and needy, the Christians look after everyone. This seems to be a new thing.
And so, down the centuries, this is taken as the lodestar: to be progressive, to be merciful, to be better than those who went before us is to be - what? To expand the circle of concern wider and wider. To give aid to the victims. To make victimhood, finally, as in the chief complaint about wokeism, the one badge of correctness and proof from all criticism. I am disadvantaged, you owe me but I owe nothing!
One of the virtues, gone wild. Charity. Made into an idol.
What's your principled way of differentiating Girard from other thinkers like Foucault or Derrida who similarly pulled Big Transcendent Ideas out of their not-very-rigorous behinds? Not looking for an ideological fight here, just genuinely curious. Are you arguing that all such thinkers should have zero academic respectability, or is there something uniquely unrigorous about Girard?
Yup, all such thinkers should have zero academic respectability. Or, more accurately, should be placed in a seperate academic category for interesting speculation (at least Foucault). The problem isn't the ideas, it's that academia doesn't really have a category for things that lack methodological rigor so instead of Foucault just being like here are a bunch of thoughts I've had it gets dressed up and made harder to approach to satisfy some sense that academic content has to be hard to produce and then treated as if it was therefore had a substantial degree of justification or argument behind it.
Though Foucault is closer to just: here are some ideas than others .
I'm inclined to agree with you in spirit, but how do you do this in a sensible way? Do you throw out all of philosophy? If not, how do you decide who to keep?
The issue is the methodology not the claims at issue. What you do is you focus peer-review/academic acceptability on clarity and precision.
The issue isn't the ideas that any of these thinkers have. It's the obscurantist way they are presented and argued for. Modern analytic philosophy is incredibly broad in the kind of arguments it is willing to consider but it puts demands of clarity on them. You are supposed to spell out exactly what you mean and give clear definitions.
The problem with continental philosophy is the fact that it's work to figure out what is being claimed to the point that there are common debates arguments about about what is really meant. It's a neat trick that makes the reader feel they've gotten something of intellectual value because their brain got a work out and to see the work as more valuable because they read in their own ideas.
Besides, anytime people focus on whether X was claiming Y or Z rather than whether Y or Z is true suggests a problem unless you are doing literal history (and yes this is an issue in areas viewed as analytic philosophy too...part of why I didn't initially use the analytic/continental terminology)
That part is the basic pitch for analytic philosophy (tho see paren above) but I'd go much further and suggest that we move away from the book or article as the appropriate unit of contribution and towards the exchange (claims and rebutals). Rather than discouraging direct responses the assumption should be that for every article published they'll be several rebuttals and a back and forth.
If it's a good idea/argument then when there is a reply saying do you mean A or B here and dissecting each step will result in an improved argument.
I think what we know about human thought tells us that the more we demand specificity and careful pedantic steps the less likely we are to make errors (provided you publish rebutals ow there is danger you just get a library of the philosophical equivalent of those clever trick proofs 0=1).
Will it be as inspiring or pleasant to read for the layperson? No probably not but that's the reason we have specialists.
Scott, I think you might enjoy Opening the Heart of Compassion. It's the best English language treatment I know of the Buddhist psychological model and I think it makes some suggestive predictions about victim mindset. Be warned, the first third of the book is esoteric Tibetan Buddhism stuff. It also has a half a page long, nine step version of the therapy method that I found to be the best after trying about a dozen.
> Finally, Lukianoff began cognitive behavioral therapy with Jonathan Kaplan, a psychologist who grounded his practice in Buddhism. Gradually, Lukianoff began to feel better. “I began to see my thoughts like the weather,” he says. This self-mastery again changed Lukianoff’s life.
Given that Laius, Oedipus' father,. was accused of being the first gay/paederast, that alternate version could work too:
"After the death of his father Labdacus, Laius was raised by the regent Lycus but Amphion and Zethus usurped the throne of Thebes. Some Thebans, wishing to see the line of Cadmus continue, smuggled the young Laius out of the city before their attack, in which they killed Lycus and took the throne. Laius was welcomed by Pelops, king of Pisa in the Peloponnesus. According to some sources, Laius abducted and raped the king's son, Chrysippus, and carried him off to Thebes while teaching him how to drive a chariot, or as Hyginus records it, during the Nemean Games. Because of this, Laius is considered by many to be the originator of pederastic love, and the first pederastic rapist."
Honestly, the Cadmeans are just slightly less fucked-up than the Atreides.
Oedipus is now Oedipa, a spunky brave princess who sets out to find the secret behind her identity. Disguising herself as a man, Oedipus, she arrives in Thebes....
Oedipa: *marries father, takes over ruling Thebes, relegates Dad to looking after the (grand)kids which we carefully gloss over how come there's babies now*
Audience: GIRLBOSS! STRONG INDEPENDENT WOMAN!
Then we can blame the plague etc. on The Patriarchy and a plot to ovethrow Oedipa because the fuddy-duddies can't stomach a Strong Independent Girlboss Queen and something something The Furies actually are on her side something something.
>"Satan will descend to Earth in the form of Barak... insane right-wing conspiracy theorists"
The Obama years are such a distant memory now that my first reaction on reading this was to wonder what the right-wing conspiracy theorists have been saying about Ehud Barak.
Is it just me, or does step 4 in the single-victim process seem like a non sequitur? I don't see why killing the victim would mean that people "stop coveting their neighbors’ stuff quite so hard, at least for a while."
I'd say the explanation is people feel a sense of belonging and purpose by joining the mob and successfully kill the victim, so they sense equality and put aside the desire to be better/have more than the other
The sense of unity, that "we're all in this together" and of equality; me and my neighbour successfully drove out the element causing misfortune and evil, so we are on friendly and even familial terms now. We share what we have, or we share in the social aftermath. There's no envy (for a while, at least) to drive me to want their stuff or them to want mine.
Would someone mind getting me over the line regarding the opening reference to Obama being the antichrist? Is this Scott being tongue-in-cheek or is this an implication concluded in the book aka "something-something-woke-democrats?"
Obama being the antichrist is an old meme from back when he was president. For whatever reason, there was a decent amount of rhetoric from the religious right comparing him to the antichrist, and according to some poll, 13% of people actually believed that he was the antichrist (another 13% said they were "unsure"). There were also a few cases where a heckler shouted at Obama that he was the antichrist (here's one such case: https://www.nbcnews.com/video/heckler-obama-you-are-anti-christ-312206403708 ).
"It would help if Girard could come up with some specific way that wokeness went too far and became qualitatively different from the Christian imperative."
Christianity demands that elites imagine themselves as victims. Victims should also imagine themselves as elites. Both should imagine themselves as brothers. This is an extremely difficult ideal to uphold for both elites and victims. Everyone will fail at this ideal because everyone is broken, but everyone should try to reach this ideal because everyone is redeemable. Both halves of the ideal are important for continuing to make progress.
Wokeness demands that elites (really, the intelligentsia) imagine themselves as victims. It makes no demands on the victims. Neither the oppressors nor the victims are seen as redeemable, either because they're evil or because they're already justified. The result is half a flywheel that spins out of control.
Even worse, it imagines no agency on the part of victims. The victims will always be victims and virtuous as a result.
When someone classified as a victim proves this wrong by having agency, he or she is thereby reclassified not just as an oppressor, but as a heretic. The resulting mob mentality is worse as a result.
Ah, yeah that's not clear. That "neither the oppressors nor the victims are seen as redeemable" is a fair characterization of the essence of wokeness, and not just of the mob-dynamics of movements. That Christianity meaningfully circumvented this, at least at times, rather than just professing to circumvent it.
Really I'm just interested in this kind of analysis, identifying moral undercurrents in religion and modern social movements, but deeply tired of all the hysteria and rationalized venting-of-grievances, I really want to read someone who has made sense of it all *fairly*, and is able to speak to the good and failures of wokeness, and can distinguish the emotional heart of the movement from the kinds of spirals of unaccountable mob behavior that tend to occur when a movement's capacity for action is curbed (by its own inability to control itself, likely!)—without giving into the various excesses towards either side that seem to be unavoidable on this topic.
Thank you! Hopefully someone comes along and gives some recommendations; for now, I'll take a vague stab at it. There's a good chance I'll still fall into those excesses at times.
I have yet to find a convincing argument *why* the accumulated theorizing of wokeness kind of took over and common-sense liberalism seems defenseless, though. If you're looking for that- good luck.
>I really want to read someone who has made sense of it all *fairly*
It's something I've found irritating for quite a while as well, that there's no great treatment of and too many pitfalls. Right-wingers are too polemical, centrists end up doing too much throat-clearing to not sound like right-wingers.
>is able to speak to the good... of wokeness
Frankly, here's one of the pitfalls, I'm not sure there is. To specify, I think wokeness is a mob-dynamic accumulation of different academic theories that are intended to address real and considerable problems, but go about it in ways so wrong all of the theorizing is useless. At best wokeness is useful to identify problems, but as of yet produced no solutions and many failures. I think this may be an inherent problem as an outgrowth of postmodern deconstructionism- it's a field of thought that is incapable of positive development.
There are a few circumstances where you literally fight fire with fire. Trying to fight racism with more racism, forever, or fight sexism with more sexism, is just lighting fires for the fun of it and you don't really care what happens.
>"neither the oppressors nor the victims are seen as redeemable" is a fair characterization of the essence of wokeness, and not just of the mob-dynamics of movements.
Agreed about the nature of this being a mob dynamic. My position is that the danger of the mob dynamic is descended from many years of academic theorizing being applied (semi-) literally in ways that they *probably* weren't intended to be taken literally. The thought that's been in my head lately is "intersectionality is a koan," and trying to apply a koan literally is often foolish or dangerous.
The phrasing could've been better and while I don't have a good essay or book to recommend, there's a lot of stuff I'd gesture at.
Oppressor/oppressed is an incredibly potent method of othering and developing tribal instincts, and once combined with the identity-group theorizing that accumulated to form wokeness, it can be used to justify nearly anything.
On the "irredeemable oppressor" side, I would point at everyone who has ever used the word "whiteness" unironically. Robin Diangelo, Tema Okun, Donald Moss, Tommy Curry- as just a handful of writers, of varying degrees of popularity, playing a shell game of what "whiteness" means and that it's something people can never truly recover from. I might go as far as hailing back to Frantz Fanon and the whole field of decolonialism.
On the "oppressed don't need redeemed" side, I'd point at things like... well, Hamas apologists and "what do you think decolonization meant?" Or Canadian laws about lesser sentences for non-white criminals, various US DAs implementing similar policies, the weird tensions generated between policies like softer sentences for actual rapists but more social sanctions for asking someone out the wrong way. I think it's inherent to the philosophy that the oppressed are virtually without agency; whatever they do is in reaction to those oppressing them and justified by virtue of being oppressed.
>That Christianity meaningfully circumvented this, at least at times, rather than just professing to circumvent it.
I would phrase it slightly differently: Chrisianity at least provides the *theory* of circumventing it, whereas the theories that accumulated to form "wokeness" do not.
Most notably, in Paul's letter to the Galatians, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." The intention is to rise above other identity markers like race and sex. Wokeness takes the opposite approach of solidifying those identity markers as permanent (and unscalable?) separations between people.
Likewise, Romans 3:23-24, "since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus... ." It is a state shared by all of humanity, and all of humanity is (potentially, but let's not get too theologically digressed) redeemed in Christ.
The oppressor/oppressed dynamic does not provide a path of redemption, at least in part because they are systemic: you as an individual cannot change your status (maybe you can find a new axis on which you're oppressed and take advantage of that), no one else can change your status, at best you can try to minimize your harms and abdicate as much of your undeserved power as possible.
That was a lot and thanks to Substack's lack of formatting, not terribly well-organized. But I can try to elaborate if any of it interests you.
Oh, I think you are committing one of the fallacies of "analyzing wokeness" which I am trying to find a treatment that avoids—
I am quite certain it is not an *intellectual* movement. Misunderstanding it to BE one leads to, of course, viewing it as a bad one. But: "Mob-dynamic accumulation of different academic theories that are intended to address real and considerable problems" is wrong. There is a crit-theory *backing* for things, and it comes up, but I am quite sure (as a sympathizer) that the essence of the movement is an enormous body of *anecdotes*, known to all.
It's akin to how we all generally know "the U.S. healthcare system is deeply fucked up" without necessarily knowing a single piece of hard evidence why—hearing 10000 stories of how people have fallen through the cracks, or e.g. end-stage dialysis providers have abused patients to exploit an Obamacare loophole, has the cumulative effect of indicting the entire system in one's mental model to the point where it is irredeemable. Just a few data points, or a few personal experiences, points to a 'flawed subsystem'. But at some point the negative data is so plentiful—and corroborated by personal experience, e.g. I have never had a good time interacting the medical system except for a single boutique PCP—that all those subsystems failures "backpropagate" to indict the whole thing.
Returning to wokeness—it is very necessary to distinguish the "emotional engine" of it, this anecdote, from the *argument* used to intellectualize it on the plane of discourse. At best these are reasonably sound crit-theory, but the core emotional posture is literally unable to participate in rational discourse, so great is the pain every single true believer is feeling—this shows up as a *refusal* to, sometimes, or a pitiable attempt to, but in either case these are not fallacies of the movement but evidence for *how much hopeless pain these people are feeling*—not, I think, unjustifiably; the human mind is not designed for exposure to so much bad news.
> produced no solutions and many failures
The state of intense and hopeless pain is begging for someone else to produce solutions. It cannot. All it can do is hate the thing which it has come to believe is the source of the pain.
> Oppressor/oppressed is an incredibly potent method of othering and developing tribal instincts, and once combined with the identity-group theorizing that accumulated to form wokeness, it can be used to justify nearly anything.
Yeah, I guess I agree with all this. But I think of this as a post-hoc rationalization of the mob dynamics (of course, re-used to fire up more mobs, and wielded mercilessly by teenagers online).
All your examples are good. I am so numb to this stuff I stopped remembering them/taking them seriously. "What did you think colonization meant" is of course egregious, but... isn't that just kids (maybe 20-some, but basically kids) online, saying nonsense? How seriously is that taken? Plenty of horrible stuff being said on both sides. Always has been, see e.g. nutjob Iraq war apologism.
> I would phrase it slightly differently: Chrisianity at least provides the *theory* of circumventing it, whereas the theories that accumulated to form "wokeness" do not.
I see what you mean. I tend to think of Christianity-the-religion as a tremendous motte-and-bailey, with this stuff the motte (er, the inner one), and even Bible itself as a book that says some nice stuff but is not ... magic enough... to pull off what it tries to do. Is a movement that offers a good theory but fails to realize it almost all of the time any better than one that doesn't offer a good theory at all?
Great answer, anyway, thank you. Clarifying my thoughts on this.
> speak to the good... of wokeness
What I sense as "the good"—am I going to have to write this essay myself?—is not in the claims or language of wokeness, but in that emotional heart, which amounts to a tremendous weight of evidence against a lot of rigidly-held beliefs of modernity, and demands that they by uprooted and changed. This is basically good, because our society is in fact very oppressive. But it is not possible for a society to act on the "revolutionary change" emotion alone, you *need* a synthesis with a conservative voice to produce any changes that can be trusted. The emotion behind wokeness ought to supply the *energy* that motivates less-hysterical people to work around-the-clock to change the world.
I *suspect* it's a fallacy, anyway, that's my point.
Want to add that I think very much of our current era as the end of a second "Gilded Age", which also fomented a great deal of revolutionary socialism, which had to be diffused by the creation of the whole Progressive Era state administration (not, of course, without its many flaws.) New Deal is similar. In both cases many more-radical positions were adopted by the centrist coalition, both to diffuse radicals and just for the good of it. But centrists have to establish sounder principles for action (hence New Deal welfare being argued on a liberal-rights basis instead of a strict populist-entitlement basis.)
"Half a flywheel" forms a drivable mechanical oscillator, and is used to generate vibration / haptic feedback in eg phones, game controllers (any metaphorical significance is left to the reader)
The thing about "concern for (mimetically invented) victims" is this..... its great popularity comes from the nice narcissistic feeling it gives wonderful little YOU - the woke person - about YOURSELF. And the best thing of all is that it costs you nothing.
> Cancellers never kill anybody, just drive them off Twitter for a while; usually they’re back after six months. Cancellers certainly don’t deify their victims afterwards. And none of this temporarily rejuvenates society; people are just as happy to cancel another celebrity the day after cancelling the first one.
The Cancel Culture most people fear is about a much more intimate and personal mobbing and shunning, much closer to the Scapegoat and the Ostracism.
It's about much *smaller players* being expelled from social circles, about gigs and contracts drying up, about attacks on their business or professional life, or that of partners, and all usually for the sin of holding very mainstream views or having very normal reactions to the events around them.
(These views and reactions aren't necessarily "on the right side of history", but usually common enough that if cancellers were being consistent, there would be very few businesses they could buy from, and not a lot of art or entertainment they could consume.)
I tend to think of Cancel Culture as a form of economic terrorism. However, in light of Scott's review, I wonder if there's something more primal at work: groups affirm their collective luxury or radical beliefs by projecting their individual secret doubts onto the victim, who then takes them off into the wilderness. Catharsis is achieved. Social peace is restored. Until the next time.
Re-reading, I didn't verb the sentence. Bad grammar! No cookie!
I was not however talking about a court case. I was talking who is at fault morally. From my point of view, it's both.
In Rwanda, there was a radio announcer (I forget his name) calling for Hutu to kill Tutsi. Was he morally responsible? Yes. Were the machete-wielders responsible? Yes.
> Stochastic terrorism refers to political or media figures publicly demonizing a person or group in such a way that it inspires supporters of the figures to commit a violent act against the target of the speech. Unlike incitement to terrorism, this is accomplished by using indirect, vague, or coded language that allows the instigator to plausibly disclaim responsibility for the resulting violence. Global trends point to increasing violent rhetoric and political violence, including more evidence of stochastic terrorism.
I imagine this is what keeps JK Rowling's security detail up at night.
If that's the "Cancel Culture" people are afraid of, then I don't know why they only started complaining now, considering that it's older than the United States itself. Jamelle Bouie actually wrote a great opinion piece on this: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/12/opinion/cancel-culture-tocqueville.html
> Under the absolute government of one alone, despotism struck the body crudely, so as to reach the soul; and the soul, escaping from those blows, rose gloriously above it; but in democratic republics, tyranny does not proceed in this way; it leaves the body and goes straight for the soul. The master no longer says to it: You shall think as I do or you shall die; he says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your goods, everything remains to you; but from this day on, you are a stranger among us. You shall keep your privileges in the city, but they will become useless to you; for if you crave the vote of your fellow citizens, they will not grant it to you, and if you demand only their esteem, they will still pretend to refuse it to you. You shall remain among men, but you shall lose your rights of humanity. When you approach those like you, they shall flee you as being impure; and those who believe in your innocence, even they shall abandon you, for one would flee them in turn. Go in peace, I leave you your life, but I leave it to you worse than death.
I mean, "people shunning other people" is a mechanism as old as humanity itself. The question is that the traditionally "modern" viewpoint is that this is bad, because it was usually used to enforce oppressive traditional morality. The village's old wives shunning the woman who dared being a bit less sexually repressed and such. Consider how much our pop art celebrates the outcast who runs against the grain and are able to stand their own even when no one believes in them, and are eventually proven right. The novelty here is instead people with progressive values (so very much anti traditional morality) looking at this tool like Boromir looks at the One Ring and asking "Why not use this ring?".
But of course, the hearts of men are easily corrupted. And the ring of power has a will of its own.
Yes, I think that the difference is that in Cancel Culture the victims are often people with mainstream views and/or just operating in the mainstream world.
That means that just everybody is potentially guilty of some terrible transgression against social justice... which seems jolly convenient for the self-appointed inquisitors and their salems.
That's not quite my point; yes, it is true that sometimes people on the left get outraged at people having overall relatively *centrist* opinions in the Overton window simply because they are to the right of them, and thus try to cancel them. But since cancelling is based on social shame, by definition, the smaller the quantile of people far off from the idea to be outraged, the lower its power. In fact this is in part also a feature of cancel culture: it acts as if it was a vastly majoritarian view but it's not, and so at best it creates polarization, not suppression of ideas (and then uses this ineffectiveness to claim it doesn't really do anything at all).
But my point was more that there is NO actual good way to harness the power of self-righteous crowds whipped to a frenzy to enact mob justice. Self-righteous crowds are just bad. They're not bad based on their goals, they're bad because they can't be controlled and whatever their starting goals they always manage to warp them into some dumb oversimplified thing that becomes merely a rationalization to feed their lust for validation. Never summon that which you cannot control, and you cannot control self-righteous crowds. Eventually the monster escapes your control and eats you too, every single time.
To the first: The condemned opinions aren't usually centrist, they're just normie, e.g. "looting is bad/bad for the cause you're rioting for". And though the cancel mobs are a minority, they dominate the arts and higher education, often in non-productive roles... and can do actual economic damage to people pursuing vocations
To the second: I just don't know. It would be nice to be able to rule out crowd social/professional justice on general principle. However, doesn't it have some utility where an individual is a pest in some manner? "Don't work with X, he can't keep his hands to himself."
I meant "centrist" in the sense of in the middle of the Overton window, so yeah, pretty normie was my meaning.
I think some amount of that sort of "gossiping" within closed circles of people can be useful - though it can also go awry, and in general it's always good to keep things up to a decent standard of evidence rather than just "someone told me". It's a dangerous game to play though; I'd still say it's much better to e.g. simply have a good HR department in place that can conduct a proper investigation. But the problem is also doing it through the internet, when people have approximately zero chance to examine context or sometimes straight up know anything about what they're talking about. And this also holds for accusations that would be serious if true; when we're talking about silly stuff like as you say holding completely average opinions such as "looting is bad" or "the police is good, actually", then yeah, it's just straight up insane. Not to say that for example you can't criticize the police or that it can't be fully deserved; what's absurd is to expect everyone else to think the police is just overall bad as a matter of fact and call ignorant or fascist anyone who disagree.
This is nothing new. For example, TERFs will tell you stories of venues accidentally double booked, and regular gigs mysteriously drying up. It's not about people sending r*pe threats to JKR, it's about smaller players like Sophie Distras getting booted from platforms.
> groups affirm their collective luxury or radical beliefs by projecting their individual secret doubts onto the victim
This describes the Cancellation of Larry Summers and James Damore perfectly. The luxury belief is that the two genders both equally love obsessing over building machines. Of course anyone's common sense disagrees, and indeed Harvard admission's dept and Google recruitment dept both have loads of empirical evidence siding with commonsense. But the one who "Notices" - even with the most gentle anecdotes or objective analysis -must be denounced and destroyed by the mob. Gender equality restored :)
It does suggest that this isn't going to go away until the institutions go away, or are thoroughly reformed. On weakness the UK has is that we have a vast charitable sector, with lots of public work outsourced to non-profits.
Regarding cancel culture, thinking of it in terms of the suffering of the victim seems like a bit of a strawman (tho ironically appropriate here). That's like saying that the medevil catholic church's attempts to clamp down on scientific discoveries were horrible because they made the heretics unhappy. Sure, no one wants to be punished but one could reasonably counter that the ideas the heretics raised could easily make many other people feel unhappy/worried/etc and maybe the balance falls in favor of punishing heresy especially if you leave out the burning alive parts.
The better argument has always revolved around the costs if you end up using social pressure to prevent the acceptance of valuable correct ideas.
Just read the first three sentences and told myself "damn, seems really interesting, would love to be able to read the entire text, on paper, when I chill at home".
Could it make sense to have some sort of paper version of the 100 best articles from Astral Codex Ten?
Been a long time since I read Oedipus, but I'm pretty sure the oracle blamed the plague on the former king's murderer still being unpunished; the prophecy of killing his father and marrying his mother was specifically given to Oedipus and his parents at his birth, and he thought he'd beaten it by leaving home.
The prophecy was given to his parents and they therefore abandoned him to die in the mountains as a baby with his feet pierced. He was adopted by a shepherd. As in many of these stories the irony is that by trying to escape the prophecy his parents helped it come to pass (that is, he would not have married his mother if he had known her as a child).
If we are going to talk about liberal legal processes as the alternative to scapegoating, I think Athenian tragedy may be relevant. Euripides, in particular, shows Orestes being driven mad by the Furies after he has killed his mother and her lover to avenge their murder of his father; but the Furies are turned away by Athena setting up a court where Orestes can be tried and aquitted. That particular mythic account antedates Christianity by several centuries.
I would also suggest that Nietzsche's criticism of slave morality should not be taken as a simple advocacy of master morality. Nietzsche has critical things to say about master morality as well. And very importantly, he argued that the "faith in opposite values" was a fundamental mistake in ethical thinking—and "Nietzsche criticized slave morality and therefore must have advocated master morality" seems like a classic manifestation of that faith.
The difference between Christian morality and woke social justice is that Christianity is primarily about the Christian’s achieving salvation, faith, grace, sainthood and secondarily about concern for social justice.
A Christian community sees its Christianity as vital for its members, so it has to be wary about the influence of the outside world. And sees itself as better in at least some way than the non Christian community. The Christian community believes it has the higher ideals that people should submit to, although it falls short of them.
“Wokeness” however assumes that the “Other” is somehow wonderful and special and that “we” are committing some primordial sin by “othering” the outsider. (This explains why woke leftists are so sympathetic to Islamists).
In my experience woke types absolutely mistrust the outside world. That's what all the social media censorship and fretting about Good Representation and safe spaces are for. Did you ever read the SCC post "I can tolerate anything except the outgroup?" Just because a group claims to like the "other" doesn't mean they actually do, the most other you can be to a woke American is a conservative American. They do have lofty ideals they want us all to be striving for, but feel everyone falls short on, for example: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Yes, but the conservative American isn’t an outsider to America. The woke American takes what they see as most traditional to their country and rejects that.
DEI are values but they aren’t the values of a society, they are a statement that societies should be as porous as possible. Of course in practice they can function to create ideological homogeneity in institutions but that isn’t their ostensible purpose.
I was moderately shocked some years ago when I found out that Tyler Cowen counted Girard as one of the great thinkers of the 20th century. Yes, I was aware of the fact that Girard had acquired somewhat of a following outside the academy, I'd even cruised on by a Girardian website or two, but Tyler Cowen? I'm not a Cowenite by any means, but I think he's a smart guy with interesting things to say. He's also an empirical social scientist by training and Girard is, well, I guess he's (Continental) philosopher write very large. A completely different kind of thinker.
Is Cowen following, deferring to, Peter Thiel on this? I don't know.
Anyhow, I gave Girard a serious go some years ago, and then pretty much forgot about him. Dick Macksey brought him in as a guest lecturer in one or two of the five-I-believe-it-was courses I'd taken with him, certainly the course on the autobiographical novel, perhaps the course on the theater as well. Anyhow Girard lectured on mimetic desire and sacrifice and I found it pretty interesting, even compelling. When the English translation Violence and the Sacred came out I read it, marked it up extensively, and then pretty much forgot about Girard. Why? Because by that time my interest in literature had taken me to, of all places, the cognitive sciences in general, and computational semantics in particular. That's a conceptual world that's very different from Girard. No, I liked Lévi-Strauss on myth, the way he analyzed him more than his sometimes puzzling, if not silly, meta-commentary on it all. I saw a line from Lévi-Strauss to cognitive science (& an AI researcher, Sheldon Klein, did a simulation of his myth model back in the late-1970s), so I went there. From Girard, not quite nothing.
For those basic stories of mimesis and sacrifice have stuck with me, so much so that a couple of years ago I used them in an analysis of Steven Spielberg's Jaws, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/02/shark-city-sacrifice-a-girardian-reading-of-steven-spielbergs-jaws.html. The model seemed to work there, and I have no doubt that it works in other cases as well. But as a theory of everything? Really? You believe in those, theories of every-damn-thing, do you?
"Is it really true that all violence is a by-product of mimetic rivalry? Here’s the kind of situation Girard is asking us to imagine. Two men, Jimmy and Joey, stand beside a lake on a hot day. Jimmy decides to go for a swim. Joey, who would never have had this idea in his life, immediately decides to do likewise. Inevitably, this causes a death struggle between the two men as they fight over the lake."
As someone who has read MR pretty religiously for more than 10 years now, I am of the opinion that Tyler is not above a certain degree of pretentious-ness.
As perhaps epitomized by his innumerable references to "Straussian reading." It mystified me at first, as it has many. I assumed he meant Leo Strauss, whom I've not read. The problem is that I'm from a literary background. When I see someone refer to an "Xian reading" of this or that, I expect to see themes typical of X. A Freudian reading is one thing, a Marxist reading is something else, then we have feminist readings and so on through a whole list. If someone does a Girardian reading, I expect to read about mimetic desire and sacrifice. Why? Because those are Girard's central themes.
But I never could find any particular themes in Cowen's Straussian readings. I finally decided that, since Strauss had argued that many ancient authors cloaked their true beliefs in verbal mystery as a way to dodge censorship, Cowen uses the term where I would simply talk of an interpretation or a reading. In Cowen's usage, then, there is no particular kind of reading that is Straussian in the sense that it is based in Strauss's ideas. It's just a somewhat, yes, pretentious (virtue signalling?) way of saying he's going to interpret the text.
"Straussian reading" seems to be a discrets concept in itself used ubiquitously in some field in some era (late-20thc poli theory?) but not commonly known beyond that.
Right. It does belong to a specific intellectual culture. But, in Cowen's use, the phrase does not seem to indicate a specific kind of reading. It just seems to me that all is not how things appear on the surfece.
Which is to say that it has no content beyond what a literary critic or a philosopher means by talking about "interpretation" or "reading," except that he's implying a different intellectual community.
A "Straussian reading" is a polsci term. It means reading politically-charged texts as products of the ideological constraints of their times. I.e. if it would be political suicide (or just damaging) for someone to express certain opinions openly due to the prevailing opinions of their times, it can still be inferred that they held that position or opinion by reading from their choices of omissions or seeking veiled arguments.
And yes, it comes from Leo Strauss.
Cowen, however, does not seem to use it in the sense that Strauss would. He seems to use it simply to mean "a close reading that goes beyond the surface", which does strike me as a bit pretentious.
As far as Economists go Cowen isn't that Empirical. This isn't to say that he lacks technical skills or anything, but if you read his columns and posts he comes to his positions by arguing from first principles, not by starting from the data. He also has a fondness for looking at a deeper, potentially hidden, meaning (i.e. his whole 'Straussian' thing), in that sense you can see why he'd like Girard.
I fear that books like this (ie books that might be called continental philosophy by the non-specialist) exploit a number of weaknesses in the way academia works and in our reasoning systems to be taken more seriously than is epistemicly supported by the arguments they make. While I raised this as a problem in a different comment it's worth exploring how they manage this hack (no doubt unintentionally).
And yes I know that an immediate reaction will be -- just another STEM person dissing work they can't understand (though I do have the equivalent of a masters in philosophy) but it's exactly that reaction which is why I think it's important to push on this point.
Sometimes books in this style can be quite aesthetically enjoyable and pleasant to read (and if not they offer a feeling of accomplishment) . And they may contain interesting ideas or suggestions -- indeed often ones which, because of their vague or hard to quantify nature aren't well represented in the academic literature (tho maybe look more to Foucault than Girad). But that's the first part of the problem.
If you like such a book, even if you aren't convinced by it's argument, you immediately face a dillema. If you call it what it is -- the literary equivalent of a TED talk (an interesting idea wrapped in a snazzy often somewhat misleading presentation) you're effectively discarding it because it's too heavy to be read for fun and there isn't a category we recognize in academia for fun wild speculation without substantial backup. In turn the complexity of the work is necessary to meet the gatekeeping needs of academia (showing you've paid your dues by mastering some complex body of work).
Where the system for evaluating worth really gets hacked, however, is in the use of hard to interpret arguments and obscure points. Sometimes via hard to follow prose but equally possible with breezy deceptively easy to follow prose that isn't easily fit into a declarative argument. This has two effects -- it ensures that people who dislike the book are disinclined to really dig into it and invites the reader who does continue to really invest themselves into it by working out their own interpretation and understanding. The resulting mental workout is easily confused with intellectual value (the same way you might think you must have been productive today because your physically tired) and we now have -- to an extent -- read in our own ideas which we all have special love for.
We've now perfectly set the stage for the last aspect -- the discrediting of the critic. Anyone who doesn't buy into the books value won't have the same detailed theory of the work so can simply be dismissed as not having really understood the work. And this flips the normal criteria of worth in which a work is less valuable the harder it is to understand on its head. Sure, some other experts in the area may attack the work with authority but those are the attacks that legitimize it as being of real epistemic value not those that call it's value as scholarship into question. Or more preciscely, since it is almost definitionally scholarship, it's epistemic value.
Ultimately, then the problem is that the incentives strongly favor even the academics who don't find the style of arguments or methodology at all epistemicly reliable to pretend the work is of value to avoid both creating enemies/drama and especially to avoid the smear that they are the kind of unsophisticated STEM person who just can't appreciate this work.
Also pushing on this point risks raising hard questions about how we value various aspects of academic practice which makes it very hard to put together a coalition around the point (the guy who does Plato scholarship has to expect they are next).
> "[Girard] has to support something like 'increasing concern with helping victims was good until about 1950, and then went too far and became bad'. This is [....] less elegant than his other claims, and he never really says it outright."
> "[Does Girard have anything to say about] things like affirmative action laws, anti-free-speech policies, journals refusing to publish politically incorrect scientific results, or colleges forcing students to take diversity classes"?
I'm not claiming people haven't been unfairly victimized after 1950, but I think there is certainly an elegant theory for Girard to be had here, according to which ever-increasing concern (starting at zero, when Christianity was introduced) with helping unfairly victimized people not only becomes bad but leads to these other things. Namely, once the concern reaches the threshold where it is strong enough to keep unfair victimization in check, further increase requires distorting reality, to support the false but necessary claim that unfair victimization is still unchecked.
Christians have been clear for a long time that too much of one virtue inevitability leads to a vice. In the words of CS Lewis:
“The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers when there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under.”
There is more to the gospel than just “don’t blame victims”, as Scott makes clear, mythology has many more stories than this. The Bible reads to me a lot like a picture by MC Escher, inverting a bunch of common intuition to sell you on a God that is patient, loving, forgiving and kind, instead of terrifying and powerful. He wants us to be humble and patient and brave and loving, not prideful and desirous and fearful and selfish. Those are hard things to do, so hard that focusing on other people’s bad behavior is usually not helpful. I think the right response to wokism is to have faith, be patient, acknowledge the good in the movement and instead of complaint or fearing, just be better exemplars of virtue ourselves and trust in the deep structure of reality to cause delusions to work themselves out. The wokest places suffer wokism a lot more than less work places. Nothing produces as many conservatives as when liberals get an uncontested hold on power, and vice versa!
Take it from chapter 18 of the Tao Te Ching:
"When the great Dao is in decline,
Benevolence and loyalty appear.
As wisdom arises, so does hypocrisy.
Only in a feuding family do filial piety and parental doting become conspicuous.
Loyal ministers emerge whenever the country is in chaos."
"Which of these two toys do you want?" "Which slice of cake do you want?"
I think it's about competition: in your examples, they're competing to have their policy preference enacted, but in mine, they're competing for existing resources.
The Biblical narrative suggests that to be spiritually elite is to suffer more than others. There is a consistent pattern of reform starting at the center and moving outward. This is the role of the prophets or the nation of Israel as a “kingdom of priests” or, in the New Testament, Jesus and the church. God’s saving action begins often with a single person and then with a single group and spreads. But the person or group that is chosen for this role bears the brunt of the world’s resistance and suffers the most. As for wokeness, one could cite many examples of its excesses. A big one is the way that it excuses victims from moral responsibility which has the effect of retarding moral development thereby setting the victim up for further travails as an irresponsible, immoral person. But that’s what happens any time you elevate a single virtue as the master virtue which trumps all others. Christianity has historically blended various virtues and held them in tension. Wokeness simplifies thought with its single imperative and ends up doing injustice in the name of justice.
Apologies if I'm missing the joke and you actually did know, but the man who fell of the horse is a depiction of the epiphany of St. Paul — the moment when the tyrannical Roman army officer falls off his horse, has a luminous vision of the Messiah in the sky, and spontaneously becomes a posthumous apostle.
Back in the ’60s, Girard extrapolated the concept of mimetic desire from literature, and used it to explain things like why Sancho Panza was so faithful. He insisted, in his criticism (IIRC) that mimetic desire was not some universal truth but just a way to understand certain problems and motivations.
As time marched on, mimetic desire became, for Girard, more and more of a universal truth. He also assembled and published a lot of backing evidence about the mythology (Violence and the Sacred; The Scapegoat; Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World) involved.
But I See Satan Fall like Lightning is a late-period attempt to synthesize and explain for a popular audience things that Girard is more persuasive about if you let him rumble up to them in hundreds of academic pages. I’m not saying Girard’s theory isn’t crazy (I always think of him as a kind of mad scientist, but a mad *social scientist*) necessarily, just that he works harder to drag more myths than just Oedipus & Apollonius into his schema.
It’s been a long time since I’ve read Girard (except ISSFLL, which I read only a couple years ago), and I’ve hardly gone through all of it, so I’m not in a position to defend him. But I’d certainly suggest that if you read more Girard you’ll find Girard does a better job of defending himself.
There is an interesting passage in 2nd Kings: When the king of Moab saw that the battle was going against him, he took with him 700 swordsmen to break through, opposite the king of Edom, but they could not. Then he took his oldest son who was to reign in his place and offered him for a burnt offering on the wall. And there came great wrath against Israel. And they withdrew from him and returned to their own land.
What makes this interesting is that surely this is an inconvenient story for the writer. He stays vague about what is the real power at work here. When I read this as an adult, I was struck by how ingrained into the psyche of Old Testament writers was the power of child sacrifice.
Where in the world does this come from? To me that’s the more interesting question at stake in your review. More so than the apologetics issue of whether Christianity uniquely fixes it such a way that we can now live in societies with hospitals, social security, and microchips. Maybe it is connected to the broader framework of mob violence, as the author suggests. But I’d really like more of an anthropological explanation than a wild chain following from mimicry.
That sacrifice is not just any child, it's the king's first-born son and his heir. So it's an all-or-nothing gambit; if the god of the Moab king doesn't help him win the battle, he's completely lost anyway and there isn't even the hope that his heir will continue the fight. It's giving the best and most valuable thing you have as a sacrifice.
I only looked this up now, and interpretations seem to be very variable from "the Israelites were so horrified by this deed that they retreated" (doesn't seem plausible); "the allies of the Israelites were disgusted and withdrew, abandoning them" (maybe); "the Moabites were so inspired by this that they fought even better and drove off the Israelites" (could be).
The king of Moab seemed to be in no doubt that it was due to Chemosh, their god, that the victory was won:
"Mesha soon rebelled against Israelite suzerainty and embarked on an expansionist policy against the Israelites, which he carried out as holy war performed as a ritual to Chemosh. After Mesha had captured the Gadite city of Ataroth (ʿAṭārōt), he slaughtered all of its inhabitants as an accomplishment of a vow he had made to Chemosh and to the population of Moab, and he brought the warden of Ataroth, the Gadite chief Uriel, to Kirioth, where Mesha sacrificed him to Chemosh. When, following his capture of Ataroth, Mesha conquered the town of Nebo, he sacrificed the whole Israelite population of the town to ʿAštar-Chemosh, likely because of ʿAštar's function as an avenger deity who was invoked in curses against enemies, and he brought all the lambs of the sanctuary of Yahweh, at Nebo to the sanctuary of Chemosh, where he sacrificed them to Chemosh.
Mesha recorded in his victory stela that he had built a high place dedicated to Chemosh in the citadel of the Moabite capital of Ḏaybān to thank the god for assuring his triumph in his military campaign against the Israelites."
The vagueness probably is due to the inconvenience of the story for the writer; the allied forces were driven back when they tried to put down the rebellion, how could this be, when the prophet Elisha had promised them victory? The answer is that the magical power of such a horrific sacrifice to the rival and demonic god (temporarily) overcomes the good guys. Of course that is very awkward if you are writing from the viewpoint that the True God is on your side so leaving it vague is the best way to resolve the problem.
See the myth of Iphigenia for the Classical world's belief in the efficacy of a royal child sacrifice, as well. And one that was ambiguous, because by placating the goddess Agamemnon set up the circumstances for his wife's hatred and his murder when he eventually comes home from Troy.
"Children were chosen from all over the sprawling Inca empire and were picked primarily based on their "physical perfection". Children chosen for sacrifice were generally "sons and daughters of nobles and local rulers"")
You give the gods your best, which is why the trickery with sacrifices as recounted by the Greeks:
"Prometheus loved man more then the Olympians, who had banished most of his family to Tartarus. So when Zeus decreed that man must present a portion of each animal they sacrificed to the gods Prometheus decided to trick Zeus. He created two piles, one with the bones wrapped in juicy fat, the other with the good meat hidden in the hide. He then bade Zeus to pick. Zeus picked the bones. Since he had given his word Zeus had to accept that as his share for future sacrifices. In his anger over the trick he took fire away from man. However, Prometheus lit a torch from the sun and brought it back again to man. Zeus was enraged that man again had fire. He decided to inflict a terrible punishment on both man and Prometheus."
Lots of old Bible stories seem to betray an enotheistic worldview: each people has their own god backing them in their corner, ours just happens to be the most awesome and powerful one. There's no denial for example that the Pharaoh's priests really COULD turn their staves into snakes: but Moses' staff-snake still eats their puny weakling staff-snakes. They do possess real magic. The Book of Exodus is best thought as Yahweh marching into Ra's territory and pummeling him into submission as he casts curse upon curse on his worshippers' land.
Your Pharaoh argument is incorrect. The magicians are able to match the first few plagues with their magic. But when they are unable to match the next plague, they say "this is the finger of god(s)". That is to say, if magic can do it, it's not divine intervention.
The distinction between "magic" and "divine intervention" is a very recent development. Historically, they were synonymous. Magic spells are just the proper way of pleading to the gods.
Magic was just understood as some kind of otherworldly power helping you at the time. Notice how Christian's later history of dealing with witchcraft is basically "if you're doing miraculous stuff and you're not receiving help from God, it must be from the Other Guy", and that held also for supposed "white" magic with on its face beneficial effects. If the Pharaoh's priest could do some magic tricks it must be that some deity backed them (or a later Christian would probably say a demon). In D&D terms, it's all Warlocks and Clerics - no Wizards as we imagine them today.
"the apocryphal story of Don Wollheim remarketing the Bible as an Ace Double -- WAR GOD OF ISRAEL on one side, THE THING WITH THREE SOULS on the other?"
Cain may have started the first city, but the suburbs are inhabited by the descendants of Abel. It is for this reason that we call commuting groups "Abelian".
Would love to see you review The Origins of Woke. Hanania is a lot cooler and more rational in print than he is on Twitter -- I sometimes found myself wondering "Is this the same guy who writes the crazy Tweets about Jeffrey Epstein and wants the Israelis to drive all the Palestinians out of Gaza?".
Tom Holland's Dominion is another sympathetic portrayal of the impact of Christianity, though he's not a Christian. Would also make for an interesting review. But it's a long book, and I'm not sure the thesis is sufficiently different from Girard's to make it worth your time.
I mean, maybe Hanania just has good editors who cut out the most Nazi-sounding shit from his books, while the unedited stream of consciousness that Twitter allows is... far less charitable.
Mimetic desire is all about achieving certainty. Thing is there are other ways to do this. It's just that mimicry is so fundamental and such a powerful way to settle uncertainty. For this, Girard's fixating on it (and anyone reading Girard) is useful. Scott you originally put me on to The Secret to Our Success. Do you see the connection between Henrich's insights about people (Ie learning by copying) and Girard? I happened to read both that book and this one about the same time, and what I think happens with Girard and Girardians generally is a fixation on a hugely important aspect of human behavior, one especially relevant in a world connected by social media.
The most important victims of wokeness are not the people cancelled on Twitter but those who suffer as the result of woke movements like the increased number of murders and car accidents after the BLM - Defund the Police movement and those who are discriminated from getting a job for being a straight white male.
Ah, sentences like that always makes me think of the most magnificent scene in “Elizabeth: The golden age”. Cate Blanchett is fantastic as Elizabeth I, but equally great in this scene is the Irish actor William Houston, who plays the Spanish Ambassador to England: Don Guerau de Spes. It is he who utters the immortal line: “You see a leaf fall, and you think you know which way the wind blows.” Link to the scene here, it is the "I too, can command the wind sir"-scene:
Just 2 pick 2 nits: a) Luke was writing in Greek - so saying "Lightning" is "barak" in Hebrew and thus "the bible says Obama is evil" is ... gives me tooth-pain. Sure, Obama means sth. evil in some language, too. (I am aware the Qanons did that, not Scott.)
b) Paraclete (the Greek word for "advocatus" who you "call to" be your helper at court) is ONLY an expression for the holy spirit in a few places in John. Mostly, the evangelists use Greek "pneuma" to speak of the "ruach elochim", the spirit of the Lord.
Yeah, came here to say the first point. It's silly to say Luke was using the Hebrew word when that wasn't the language it was written in, it's a strange backtranslation.
Not sure if this is relevant to Girard at all--Scott kind of addresses it in the passage toward the end about the antichrist --but isn’t the biggest difference between Christianity and wokeness the imperative to forgive?
Christianity explicitly codifies the value of turning the other cheek (i.e. forgiving those that have wronged us), discouraging victimization of the persecutor, whereas wokeness contains no such imperative; thus, adherents wantonly victimize any wrongdoer, whether real or imagined.
I’d never defend Christianity (or any religion/ spirituality for that matter), but I’ve always admired the Christian imperative to forgive and, today, I certainly wish that I saw more forgiveness in our society for wrongs committed ... whether real or imagined.
"Girard admires Nietzsche for correctly identifying the core of Christianity as a previously unprecedented form of morality that supported victims and the oppressed (as opposed to pagan “master morality”, which supported the powerful and popular). "
Thanks for writing this review. I now understand better how some of the tech billionaires end up talking so much about Girard and Nietzsche. I find your skepticism of Girard convincing.
I'm reading the darkening age by Catherine Nixey and it describes the early history of Christianity as full of mob violence against pagan temples and the destruction of art and literatures. This contradicts Girard's characterization of Christianity as more peaceable as compared to paganism.
“As a result of recent work, it can be stated with confidence that temples were neither widely converted into churches nor widely demolished in Late Antiquity. …. In his Empire-wide study, Bayliss located only 43 cases [of desacralisation or active architectural destruction of temples] of which a mere 4 were archaeologically confirmed.” (Lavan, “The End of the Temples: Toward a New Narrative?” in Lavan and Mulryan, p. xxiv)"
"Also counter to Nixey’s story is the evidence of temple repair and preservation, sometimes by Christian rulers and administrators, in the very period in which according to Nixey mobs were rampaging across the Empire tearing down every temple in sight. Several laws were decreed to protect art works (C.Th. 16.10.15) and esteemed buildings and temples (C.Th. 16.10.18) and Lavan notes “in regions such as Africa, Greece and Italy, temple preservation seems to have been a more prominent process than temple destruction” (p. xxxvii)."
And of course, the survival of classical literature to the present day is entirely due to the work of christian scriptoria.
Thanks for sharing. Though this is a terrible review and I struggled to get through the angry tone and long tirades that don't address the book's content at all. I am not surprised that there were some instances that go against Nixey's story. Is that it? if that is the case, I would still recommend the book.
De gustibus non disputandum as regards tone. I feel the review takes an appropriate tone given the shoddy and polemical scholarship in Nixey's work.
To say the review doesn't address the book's content is just wrong - he summarises Nixey's core arguments and then provides primary and secondary sources to show they're nonsense.
It's not the case that there were 'some instances that go against Nixey's story', rather that Nixey's narrative is a complete fiction based on wilful misrepresentation of a small number of isolated incidents, and the overwhelming consensus of serious scholars in the field is the diametric opposite of her position.
Why do you assume I haven't read the book? For anyone interested in the topic 'The Final Pagan Generation' is a far superior account.
Thanks I'll check out the final pagan. Though the book blurb is about mobs and violence perpetrated against the pagans, so it doesn't sound like a different story overall.
Nixey is about as reliable as any crank. She has an axe to grind, produced a work of pop culture masquerading as scholarship, and went with the popular and praised view of "Christians always terribad! If not for them, would be living in paradise now! Ancient world so tolerant and enlightened!"
It's in the vein of Greenblatt's "The Swerve", and in my own view, the whole "The Secret" set of self-help confidence trickery: just put your wish out there to the Universe and you will get it! It's Mysticism! It's Science! It's a floor wax and a dessert topping!
I'm grateful for this review, because once I ordered this book through inter-library loan and it sat almost unopened on the night table until it was time to return. Reading it gave me a muddled feeling. (I seem to have a sense when things are going to be murky, or incoherent, and unlike SA I don't have the bandwidth to penetrate the murk.) Nonetheless I am glad to have a better idea of the idea within.
Thanks for the thoughtful review! However, I'm not sure why you claim that Girard offers a "theory of everything"... and then give him demerits for the theory failing to explain everything. Wouldn't it be more sensible to treat his ideas like Newtonian physics... concepts that explain a lot of useful things, but only in the appropriate realm with certain limitations? For instance, can you provide the quote where he said that ALL myths conform to his pattern?
One aspect that also could be pointed out in support of his scapegoat theory is that nearly all ancient societies had sacrificial rituals, most of them involving human sacrifice. Why did the Aztecs and the Carthaginians sacrifice so many people? His thesis is that the original scapegoat killing brought peace to the community, and so the people in power made sure to keep doing remembrance sacrifices to keep the peace. (a la Hunger Games) This mechanism was independently "discovered" on every continent, because the tribes that didn't discover this process, killed themselves off in blood feuds. It's an intriguing natural selection sort of argument for the beginning of pagan religions.
Sacrifices generally stopped as Christianity spread. For example, first century Jerusalem supposedly had upwards of 1.2 million animals slaughtered in a single day… but nowadays (most) Jews don’t offer any animal sacrifices, as far as I know. Stories of the Native Americans’ contact with the Gospel are similar.
But if Girard's thesis is wrong, then what else explains the prevalence of human sacrifice in ancient society?
Nit: "One aspect that also could be pointed out in support of his scapegoat theory is that nearly all ancient societies had sacrificial rituals, most of them involving human sacrifice. Why did the Aztecs and the Carthaginians sacrifice so many people?"
To the extent that Girard emphasizes sacrificing a _single_ scapegoat, this seems to me to be a substantially different custom from _mass_ sacrifice, albeit with human sacrifice as a common element.
"But if Girard's thesis is wrong, then what else explains the prevalence of human sacrifice in ancient society?" Wild guess: Maybe as a costly signal (of piety??)???
I agree that maybe it would be more interesting to see Girard as trying to explain a certain kind of myth that is puzzling for modern people rather than as offering a theory of all myths.
I thought that the Jews stopped animal sacrifices when the Temple was destroyed by the Romans (since the Temple was where sacrifices were supposed to happen).
That's true that sacrifices came to a dramatic halt when the Temple was destroyed. But if the Temple was instantly rebuilt and back online today, none of the Jews I know would think that they now need to make actual sacrifices.
Yes, that is no doubt true, but after almost 2000 years it must seem strange to them. At least theoretically animal sacrifices are still a potential part of their religion. You say, if the Temple was rebuilt — how does the modern Jew think of the importance/role of the Temple and the idea of rebuilding it, if it isn’t a place for sacrifice?
I've read of a faction of orthodox Jews who do want to both physically rebuilt the Temple and restart actual sacrifices. Here is the url of a very strange article: https://www.countere.com/home/a-red-heifer-is-the-secret-to-understanding-the-israel-hamas-war . ( Religion sounds crazy enough to me to start with, but the notion that three different religions, all of which think that their deity controls all of time and space, *also* think that their deity deeply cares about a particular few hundred square meters of real estate, sounds to me like tin-foil-hat levels of delusion. )
> „But if Girard‘s thesis is wrong, then what else explains the prevalence of human sacrifice in ancient society?“
They really thought their societal fortunes, say the annual harvest, depended on the gods; so they tried to appease the gods, whom they conceptualised like mafia bosses, with the costliest sacrifice that they could make.
I think the question Girard is trying to answer is what actual functional social role did the sacrifices play, besides what the ancient societies thought they were doing.
I meant this as a straightforward explanation of the prevalence of human sacrifice in ancient societies, of the form „this is what motivated them to perform this behavior“. Then is then no question of „what actual functional social role did the behaviour play“, although I guess it‘s logically possible that there was some societal benefit that outweighed the huge cost.
Functionalist anthropologists take it as an axiom that everything has an „actual functional social role“, but this is hardly better than when biologists thought for a while that every animal behaviour must be for the good of the species.
Yes, but it isn't a satisfying "straightforward explanation" because it isn't true (according to us) that the harvests depended on the sacrifices to the gods. (The straightforward explanation of Islam is that it was revealed to Mohammed by Allah; everyone who doesn't believe that needs another explanation (which is probably lost to history). )
This question about sacrifice is just a subquestion of the larger question, "what is the origin of religious belief and practice if it isn't divine"?
When I say "functional social role", I don't mean that the impacts of it were necessarily beneficial.
Why should people believe they could improve their harvest by sacrificing to the gods? I think that the concept of „impersonal mechanical event“ was not invented yet, and thus the world appeared full of gods and spirits, who directed or at least caused all events. Such as the weather. Nietzsche (who appears in the book review and is discussed elsewhere in the comment section) writes in Gay Science: „Now man believed originally that wherever he saw something happen, a will had to be at work in the background as a cause, and a personal, willing being. Any notion of mechanics was far from his mind.“
For a similar-style subquestion-level answer to your larger question consider how, without an understanding of evolution by natural selection, the world more or less inevitably appears to be created by intentional agency, because of the apparent design in it.
I doubt Christianity has anything to do with stopping human sacrifices. For example, China banned the practice in 384 BCE, which obviously rules out the possibility of Christianity having any influence. Many other civilizations stopped doing it even before they started recording history. The more reasonable explanation is that the sacrifices stopped because society was becoming more stable, and it just wasn't necessary anymore.
Or it stopped once educated elites understood that the weather is a mechanical system rather than the effect of the actions of the weather god, whom you would desperately try to appease in order to end a drought. Admittedly this is speculative.
Girard countered this claim with his now celebrated aphorism: “We didn’t stop burning witches because we invented science; we invented science because we stopped burning witches.”
The problem with this is that witch trials massively increased during the same period that the Scientific Revolution was taking place. Johannes Kepler defended his own mother against charges of witchcraft.
If this is celebrated because it is witty and counterintuitive, that would just underline that seeing the invention of philosophy as the root cause is the more naive/obvious perspective. In any case, anomie‘s point about China comes into play. My question to Girard would be, why was philosophy invented at more or less exactly the same time in Greece, India and China, three independent societies distant from each other? This is the „Axial Age“, about 500 to 300 BCE. (I know little about the Jewish history that Girard emphasises according to the book review, but may have read that „Second-Temple Judaism“ also counts as an axial philosophy/religion.)
The Aztecs engaged in human sacrifice because they believed the gods who oversaw the necessary natural processes of the world were weakened and needed 'transfusions' of power to repay the debt that humanity owed them, and to strengthen them in their battles against the forces of darkness:
"Sacrifice was a common theme in the Aztec culture. In the Aztec "Legend of the Five Suns", all the gods sacrificed themselves so that mankind could live. Some years after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, a body of the Franciscans confronted the remaining Aztec priesthood and demanded, under threat of death, that they desist from this traditional practice. The Aztec priests defended themselves as follows:
'Life is because of the gods; with their sacrifice, they gave us life. ... They produce our sustenance ... which nourishes life.'
What the Aztec priests were referring to was a cardinal Mesoamerican belief: that a great and continuing sacrifice by the gods sustains the Universe. A strong sense of indebtedness was connected with this worldview. Indeed, nextlahualli (debt-payment) was a commonly used metaphor for human sacrifice, and, as Bernardino de Sahagún reported, it was said that the victim was someone who "gave his service".
The Carthaginians are interesting; there is an ongoing debate among historians about whether they actually did perform child sacrifice, and that this was just propaganda by their enemies, as against the burial sites of infants and animals that are held to provide evidence of the practice:
"Archaeologists have applied the term "tophet" to large cemeteries of children found at Carthaginian sites that have traditionally been believed to house the victims of child sacrifice, as described by Hellenistic and biblical sources. This interpretation is controversial, with some scholars arguing that the tophets may have been children's cemeteries, rejecting Hellenistic sources as anti-Carthaginian propaganda. Others argue that not all burials in the tophet were sacrifices.
...Greco-Roman sources also reference child sacrifice, such as an attempt at Tyre to revive a custom of sacrificing a boy during Alexander the Great's Siege of Tyre in 332 BCE, recorded by first century CE Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus. The church historian Eusebius (3rd century CE) quotes from Philo of Byblos's Phoenician history that:
It was a custom of the ancients in great crises of danger for the rulers of a city or nation, in order to avert the common ruin, to give up the most beloved of their children for sacrifice as a ransom to the avenging daemons; and those who were thus given up were sacrificed with mystic rites. Kronos then, whom the Phoenicians call Elus, who was king of the country and subsequently, after his decease, was deified as the star Saturn, had by a nymph of the country named Anobret an only begotten son, whom they on this account called ledud, the only begotten being still so called among the Phoenicians; and when very great dangers from war had beset the country, he arrayed his son in royal apparel, and prepared an altar, and sacrificed him.
...Although a minority of scholars has argued that the tophet ritual described in the Bible was a harmless activity that did not involve sacrificing any children, the majority of scholars agree that the Bible depicts human sacrifice as occurring at the tophet.
...Various Greek and Roman sources describe the Carthaginians as engaging in the practice of sacrificing children by burning as part of their religion. These descriptions were compared to those found in the Hebrew Bible. The ancient descriptions were seemingly confirmed by the discovering of the so-called "Tophet of Salambô" in Carthage in 1921, which contained the urns of cremated children. However, modern historians and archaeologists debate the reality and extent of this practice. Some scholars propose that all remains at the Tophet were sacrificed, whereas others propose that only some were.
In Phoenician sites throughout the Western Mediterranean (except for Spain and Ibiza), archaeology has revealed fields full of buried urns containing the burnt remains of human infants and lambs, covered by carved stone monuments. These fields are conventionally referred to as "tophets" by archaeologists, after the location in the Bible. When Carthaginian inscriptions refer to these locations, they use the terms bt (house, temple or sanctuary) or qdš (shrine), not "tophet". Archaeology reveals two "generations" of Punic tophets: those founded by Phoenician colonists between 800 and 400 BCE; and those founded under Carthaginian influence (direct or indirect) in North Africa from the 4th century BCE onward.
...Inscriptions are most common in the Tophet of Salammbó at Carthage, where there are thousands of examples. There are some from other tophets as well. Matthew McCarty cites CIS I.2.511 as a typical inscription:
To Lady Tanit, face of Baal, and to Lord Baal Hammon: [that] which Arisham son of Bodashtart, son of Bodeshmun vowed (ndr); because he (the god) heard his (Arisham's) voice, he blessed him.
Thus, these texts present the monument as a votive offering to the gods, in thanks for favor received from them. Sometimes the final clause instead reads "may he (the god) hear his voice," (i.e. in expectation of a future favor). The individual making the offering is almost always a single individual, nearly always male. The dead child is never mentioned. Tanit appears only in examples from Carthage. Other inscriptions refer to the ritual as mlk or molk. The meaning of this term is uncertain, but it appears to be the same word as the Biblical term "Molech" discussed above. The inscriptions distinguish between mlk b'l / mlk ʿdm (molk of a citizen/person) and mlk ʿmr (molk of a lamb)."
The unanswered question here is - why children? They were sacrificing animals, which all civilisations in the area would have understood as a religious practice; even an exceptional sacrifice of a child in time of danger, as in the example from Eusebius, would have not been unknown. But what looks like routine child sacrifice? Why? Of whom? Their own children?
That's what hasn't been answered satisfactorily as yet. And that is what seems to have marked them out as unusual and hence for condemnation by other cultures.
Thanks for the detailed and informative reply! To answer your question (why children?), I remember hearing Girard (or someone explaining Girard) that the scapegoat victim (in this case a child) had to be proximally associated with the citizens, but not so important that the death would disrupt society in other ways. In other words, if the patriarch of one family did something that sparked a blood feud in the town, a scapegoat is needed to restore the peace (otherwise the families will tear each other apart in civil war or a cycle of honor killings). However, if the patriarch himself is chosen as the scapegoat, the family structure and their land and livelihoods will fall into chaos/ruin. So instead, something else is chosen... a child, his right-hand servant, or his favorite horse... depending on severity of the original crime.
This process is suggested as the precursor to the more ritualized sacrifices (killing a child every Tuesday just for the sake of communal harmony), and also the precursor to our modern justice systems where we now insist that the punishment falls directly on the perpetrator. He supported it with references to Native American history, if I remember correctly. And these ideas might me more from his book Violence and the Sacred than the one Scott reviewed.
When I saw this review in my mailbox, I thought it might be about Ada Palmer's "Too Like the Lightning". Which is one of the better fiction series I've read in the last few years. And, after reading the review, it seems bears almost the same resemblance to serious work of philosophy as the reviewed book (i.e. very little, but it, too, has interesting ideas in it, despite somewhat dense writing).
It's a minor point, but if you look in Leviticus 16:21-22 the scapegoat is explicitly not killed but sent away alive into the wilderness, unlike other the goat that is offered as a sacrifice. The ritual as recorded in the Mishnah does involve the goat being killed in the wilderness, which raises interesting interpretation questions (did the ritual change? was it always intended to be interpreted that way? was it intentionally written in a way different from how it was practiced?). But if you're going to derive a theology of social change through atonement from the biblical story of the scapegoat in Leviticus, you could just as easily read the scapegoat as a model of sparing something rather than killing something.
" But “lightning” in Hebrew is barak. So the Bible says Satan will descend to Earth in the form of Barak. Seems like a relevant Bible verse for insane right-wing conspiracy theorists!"
This is a great review, now it makes me want to read this book because (1) I had no idea it came from as late as 1999, I thought it was one of those 1950s productions like Colin Wilson's "The Outsider" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outsider_(Wilson_book) (2) I had no idea Girard was "a good Catholic" and I have to admit, that bit made me eyeroll slightly since I have no interest in reading another Ernest Renan but the rest of the review leads me to think this is not the case. Excellent!
Points in no particular order:
(A) My gosh yes, that is a dreadful cover illustration. I presume it is taken from a picture of St. Paul falling off his horse on the road to the Damascus so it's connected to Christianity but I have no idea why this particular event was picked (I imagine as a cheap alternative to getting an illustrator/artist to do a proper book cover, I've seen these kinds of terrible but cheap cover art on other books that are Kindle versions and/or self-published)
(B) Nietzsche! I thought about him and his "Christianity is slave morality" at the start of the review, and I am gratified to find that I was on the same lines as Girard 😀
(C) "Most pagan myths have nothing to do with the single-victim process (eg labors of Hercules, Jason and the Golden Fleece, rape of Persephone, the Iliad, the Trojan Horse, the Odyssey, etc, etc, etc). "
Well.... you can kinda find the idea there if you poke about a bit (rather like the "all myths are a disease of language/all myths are solar myths/all myths are vegetation myths with the dying-and-returning god" crazes of comparative religion studies in the 19th century to find One Single Great Arc, come on down Sir James Frazer with your Golden Bough).
Hercules is, in a sense, *the* single victim; he's always going crazy and murdering people in a fit of rage, then having to go be purified of that crime and do penance. So he is both the cause of your troubles (just ask his music tutor) and the victim who becomes a god. The famous labours are an example of his expiation of his crimes:
"Driven mad by Hera, Heracles slew his own children. To expiate the crime, Heracles was required to carry out ten labours set by his archenemy, Eurystheus, who had become king in Heracles' place. If he succeeded, he would be purified of his sin and, as myth says, he would become a god, and be granted immortality."
His death comes about as a means of his apotheosis; only his mortal part is burned away by the funeral pyre, leaving his immortal self to ascend to Olympus, marry Hebe, and be worshipped as a god or hero in future.
Persephone is herself one of the dying-and-returning vegetation goddesses, she is Spring who is carried off to the Underworld; her mother's anger and grief means that mortals suffer from famine; she returns to the upper world, but has to periodically return back to Hades as the vegetation withers in winter. And she is also associated with the other dying-and-returning vegetation god, Adonis:
"Aphrodite found the baby, and took him to the underworld to be fostered by Persephone. She returned for him once he was grown and discovered him to be strikingly handsome. However, Persephone too found Adonis to be exceedingly handsome and wanted to keep Adonis for she too fell in love with him; Zeus settled the dispute by decreeing that Adonis would spend one third of the year with Aphrodite, one third with Persephone, and one third with whomever he chose. Adonis chose Aphrodite, and they remained constantly together. Another version states that both goddesses got to keep him for half the year each at the suggestion of the Muse Calliope."
But yeah, this is one of those "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" situations.
(C) Jonah's case is slightly different; yes, the sailors were right to cast his overboard, but Jonah didn't die, he was saved by being swallowed by the great fish and then cast up on land later. Jonah is not a sacrificial victim, but rather has to learn both obedience to the will of God and mercy.
(D) "Richard Hanania has a new book out by this title. I hope to review it soon. He claims that wokeness originated in civil rights laws from the 1960s."
The particular modern version calling itself (or called by its opponents) wokeness does like to claim legitmacy from the 60s Civil Rights struggle, but it's morphed into a hydra-headed beast of many aspirations, and there's an awful lot of whiteness involved in it. The African-American concept of "woke" is something different and goes back a lot further:
"The phrase stay woke has been present in AAVE since the 1930s. In some contexts, it referred to an awareness of social and political issues affecting African Americans.
...Black American folk singer-songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly, used the phrase "stay woke" as part of a spoken afterword to a 1938 recording of his song "Scottsboro Boys", which tells the story of nine black teenagers and young men falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. In the recording, Lead Belly says he met with the defendant's lawyer and the young men themselves, and "I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there (Scottsboro) – best stay woke, keep their eyes open."
Original wokeness was "be careful, there's a good chance of getting lynched in this place here"; modern wokeness is "you micro aggressed me!"
(E) "Girard thinks wokeness looks kind of like Christianity, makes a superficially-credible claim to be Christianity, but stands against Christianity (because it tries to justify victimization)."
I feel a Chesterton quote coming on. From "Orthodoxy":
"The phrases of the street are not only forcible but subtle: for a figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition. Phrases like “put out” or “off colour” might have been coined by Mr. Henry James in an agony of verbal precision. And there is no more subtle truth than that of the everyday phrase about a man having “his heart in the right place.” It involves the idea of normal proportion; not only does a certain function exist, but it is rightly related to other functions. Indeed, the negation of this phrase would describe with peculiar accuracy the somewhat morbid mercy and perverse tenderness of the most representative moderns. If, for instance, I had to describe with fairness the character of Mr. Bernard Shaw, I could not express myself more exactly than by saying that he has a heroically large and generous heart; but not a heart in the right place. And this is so of the typical society of our time.
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful. For example, Mr. Blatchford attacks Christianity because he is mad on one Christian virtue: the merely mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity. He has a strange idea that he will make it easier to forgive sins by saying that there are no sins to forgive. Mr. Blatchford is not only an early Christian, he is the only early Christian who ought really to have been eaten by lions. For in his case the pagan accusation is really true: his mercy would mean mere anarchy. He really is the enemy of the human race — because he is so human."
The cure is proportion, to be in the right place, and not to be isolated and magnified. All the virtues are needed, and need to work together.
(F) "The Son of God brought from Heaven to Earth a single Word of the ineffable Divine speech, and that word was “VICTIM”.
And while we're giving Nietzsche a kicking, again from "Orthodoxy":
"Of course, this shrinking from the brutal vivacity and brutal variety of common men is a perfectly reasonable and excusable thing as long as it does not pretend to any point of superiority. It is when it calls itself aristocracy or aestheticism or a superiority to the bourgeoisie that its inherent weakness has in justice to be pointed out. Fastidiousness is the most pardonable of vices; but it is the most unpardonable of virtues. Nietzsche, who represents most prominently this pretentious claim of the fastidious, has a description somewhere — a very powerful description in the purely literary sense — of the disgust and disdain which consume him at the sight of the common people with their common faces, their common voices, and their common minds. As I have said, this attitude is almost beautiful if we may regard it as pathetic. Nietzsche’s aristocracy has about it all the sacredness that belongs to the weak. When he makes us feel that he cannot endure the innumerable faces, the incessant voices, the overpowering omnipresence which belongs to the mob, he will have the sympathy of anybody who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in a crowded omnibus. Every man has hated mankind when he was less than a man. Every man has had humanity in his eyes like a blinding fog, humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell. But when Nietzsche has the incredible lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask us to believe that his aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong muscles or an aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary to point out the truth. It is an aristocracy of weak nerves."
There is an author – I have forgotten which – who compared the life of Nietzsche and his chosen antagonist, Socrates.
Nietzsche: Suffering a total nervous breakdown after seeing a horse getting flogged, and spending his last years more-or-less catatonic, kept alive by his sister. Socrates: Fighting honorably in the war in his youth, standing up to the standard spiritual assumptions of his day, calmly accepting his death sentence, and merrily drinking the hemlock while partying with good friends. Whose life more closely resembles that of the Ubermensch?
“Performative inconsistency” is the technical term for Nietzsche’s life.
You might want to test whether the reviewer's characterization of Girard as a "good Catholic" would stand scrutiny by the Church. It's true that he is steeped in the catholic culture, but I think he's not quite in-the-club when promoting ideas like the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross primarily resulted in a landmark event declaring sacrificial substitution itself to be overcome. It's a good idea, just not entirely orthodox. You can imagine the value, however, in this being the one sacrifice that stands for all those before it. Still, it seems to me, people continue to insist on scapegoating to relieve whatever demons possess their souls, and Girard makes a significant contribution in that regard. You might enjoy reading Jean-Michel Oughourlian's The Puppet of Desire that explains the possession of the Nuns of Loudun, or at least watch Ken Russell's weird film The Devils.
Regarding A: I think it’s an appropriate cover for the book and it’s easy to see why this scene was chosen: when Paul fell from the horse he heard a voice saying “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" (Acts 9:4). Paul’s conversion follows, culminating with “and he began at once to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, that he is the Son of God.” (Acts 9:20). So it was the moment when he got insight into the ultimate instance of the “single-victim process”, or in other words saw “Satan fall like lightning”.
But "Saul struck by lightning" identifies St Paul with Satan which is not a great analogy. Unless it is intended to represent the moment Saul the persecutor/prosecution (a la Satan) changes to Paul the evangelist of the Saving Victim.
I still think the book publishers were looking for a cheap image they didn't have to pay copyright for usage on, though 😁
EDIT: I knew I recognised that Mannerist style; it's The Conversion of Saint Paul by Parmigianino:
The book cover is one of those little things that irk me; I know they're a small press and trying to save money where they can, but I do wish they had splurged on proper graphic design, instead of this "Let's get an intern to clip out the main images using a graphics package and stick them on a plain black background with basic bitch font".
Whatever one may think of Girard's philosophy, he was a serious scholar and his work deserves more to make it stand out than this kind of dime-a-dozen self-published obscure tat book cover. I know you don't judge a book by its cover, but when the book looks like any number of fiction works by semi-pro authors on Kindle, then the lack of professionalism counts against it.
Not denying that the cut&paste job was a cheap and uninspiring way to obtain a book cover, but I respectfully disagree on the symbolics of the scene, I think it’s actually pretty deep.
From Scott's review, I gather that Girard equates "Satan" with the "single-victim process" and the “fall of Satan" would be dismantling of this process. On the one hand, up until this point Paul was a willful part of the mob, hence part of the process, hence his private fall from the horse would be symbolic for the larger fall of the process (Satan). On the other hand, Paul hadn't yet "seen" the fall of Satan, i.e., understood the meaning of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, but then through a divine intervention he finally did. With this other reading, his literal fall from the horse would be a red herring. But I think both readings are correct at the same time and he is both the subject and the object of the titular sentence. In a way, seeing the fall is the fall.
There’s another layer of confusion, since Paul actually went blind for couple days after his “accident”, but it might have been to pull a Craik–O'Brien–Cornsweet over the symbolic domain: he had to lose his sight to be able to regain it, which symbolizes insight.
There's a rational reason to lean (at least slightly) towards wokeness: Tolerating injustice sets a precedent, which lowers the threshold for further injustice, until nobody can rely on justice anymore. This way I argue myself into supporting people, who otherwise wouldn't mobilize my empathy.
My experience with very woke people is, they are divers. There's the scheming faker, who picked up the rules of the game and plays to exert power. There's the wayward rationalist, simply getting to emotional. There are lots of them believing honestly in the good of their cause.
Wokeness looks to me like the logical successor of the politically correct 1990s/2000s and whatever movements paved the way before. There's a slight chance it develops further into an application of realistical justice and a fair chance it get's eaten by history in a few decades. I hope for the 1st option.
Re mimetic desire as the basis of all, or almost all, desire: I'm open to this theory as a hypothesis on which to base research. But for acceptance, I'd want to see years of careful studies of living people. As is, I'm skeptical. The toy example and others I've seen (often the tired one about why suburbanites buy new cars) seem to me to follow the same pattern as "We have the story of Jesus. See? All myth is about single-victim sacrifice." One sees plenty of examples of kids playing happily side by side with different toys, and plenty of suburbanites who hate having to buy a new car and put it off as long as possible. And in the hands of Girard, I think the idea of mimetic desire comes with some clear baggage, including a not-small degree of misanthropy and hostility to desire as such. My memory is that somewhere G. suggests that mimetic desire is the, or a, curse of our fallen state, and I sense in him an implication that, in a before-the-fall state, it is not that we would we experience authentic desire, but no desire at all--except perhaps to obey the divine command. I wonder if in part he's thinking of Augustine's idea that, before the Fall, Adam and Eve had sex without pleasure or desire, simply as a rational response to God's command to be fruitful and multiply.
I appreciate how any grand theory of "wokeness" that goes beyond the bugaboos of the present moment stumbles upon the fact that it's just a term for moral progress.
It's disappointing that even earnest steelmanning of "wokeness" mostly avoids granting it its core objective of equality. Instead, we get the victim-oppressor model which is just applied right-wing/hierarchy-minded derision again. This makes inevitable the discourse of envy and craving the psychological rewards of mob justice against the oppressor. And the less said the better about any model where the poor cancelled racist takes on the Christ-like aura of the sacrificial lamb.
Personally, I see equality (of power) as a basic consequence of innate human dignity, barely if at all contingent. It's an intrinsic value. Left-wing politics is the only thing that even purports to try to optimise for it (and is willing to make the requisite trade-offs against overall prosperity), so I find myself aligned with it, whether or not I roll my eyes at the occasional bit of silliness.
As a lifelong progressive, born and raised in a progressive household and raising my children with those values, living and working deep in the heart of politically-blue America, I deeply wish that it was. _Deeply_ wish.
It's really not "just a term for moral progress", it's at least a specific cultural movement that joins both goals *and means* considered optimal for achieving moral progress. There obviously are other possible views on how to pursue moral progress, and people on the left in the 2010s chose this specific set of them. It's kind of a joke how the same people who go on at length about others needing to examine their own unspoken cultural assumptions are unwilling to admit they have them too and instead argue theirs is merely the Default any sane and good person has to converge to.
I prefer Tom Holland’s explanation that leftism is what happened when a Christian cultural environment became unmoored from actual Christian theology in our secular age.
>Rene Girard is against this. He shares the basic anti-woke fear that all of this ends in some kind of totalitarian communism, or in a bloody war of all against all where everyone accuses everyone else of being some kind of oppressor.
Well, clearly the solution is to find the leader of the Woke faith, and form a mob to kill them!
I would draw it as Slave Morality (Judaism) -> Victim/Oppression Obsession (Judeo-Christianity, later Marxism for the nonbelievers) -> modern wokeness. The only problem with wokeness is it's just degenerate slave morality. Add in the vigor and vibrance of a slave morality that cares about all aspects of life and you get back to liberalism.
Slave Morality celebrates talent and strength but only when subordinated to non-aggression, self-control, compassion, and generosity, and trust me you don't want the alternative.
Oh, obviously I don't expect it to make this country a happier place. This is about survival and human progress, nothing more. Besides, we're basically half-way there already. Wealth is being siphoned upward, our democracy is a brittle facade, and power is ultimately held by those who are unaccountable to most of the populace. All I'm asking is that we stop pretending to care about the weak so we can make the necessary changes to increase efficiency.
While we are talking the modern victim cult, here is something that occurred to me recently. Something which has no doubt been thought through in far more depth by bigger brains before: but as I am an engineering researcher, I'm not that well read in the humanities: so apart from general feedback, I'd be happy to get pointers to sources where this was already more nicely put.
The thing is, in addition to all other aspects of it that are nasty, I think that modern woke victim culture is fairly damaging *for its adherents and followers* (see also Scott's statements elsewhere in the comments about him being their psychiatrist). My theory is that being woke in the modern sense is intrinsically psychologically damaging, because it induces a mindset that actively stifles personal growth.
How so? Well, consider the core societal archetypes societies worked with before the woke virus struck. Who were inspirational stories about? Heroes. Prophets. Historical figures of great importance. Kings, generals. Later, in Christianity (at least the Orthodox and Catholic versions), saints.
Who do we have now? Victims.
And there is one crucial difference between the woke victim, and the archetypes of yore. The latter had agency. And generally, were human beings who had it more or less horrible in at least some ways, were faced with considerable difficulties, but grew with the challenge. And ultimately succeeded, in whatever way was deemed important. For a saint, that could mean being shot through with arrows or fed to the beasts - but he made it to heaven because of his personal growth that let him forgive his attackers, so all good (most heroes of yore instead settled for simply winning a war, and getting the girl - but as I said, there is considerable variety here). The red thread that runs through all these stories, as varied as they are, is that they give examples of people overcoming hardship, and personally growing in the process.
Contrast that to the woke victim. The only agency such a victim has is to exist, and to have suffered some sort of injustice - no personal growth is ever needed, or considered. Or even desired. Typically, the woke movement doesn't care at all about members of the chosen victim groups who actually tried to change their lot: slaves who successfully rebelled, or ghetto inmates who fought back. These are heroes of local cultures (e.g. in Israel), but overall of no importance to those who want to make the world feel guilty for existing.
Obviously, this focus on static victims is in no way a worldview on which one can reflect, nurture oneself by absorbing it, and personally grow.
To be fair, no one seems to ever have directly said that the victims of woke culture were to be used as examples: but crucially, there is almost nothing else that is really being talked about. There are no heroes in the woke world, only villains: and static victims. In such a bleak world, the soul shrivels almost by definition. And it does, as the overall tristesse of the woke crowd shows.
With all due respect, you seem to be missing my point. What I am arguing is that even in Christianity, even if it were a slave morality (a point I personally would contend - but then, there is a reason it's called a belief, so it's a grey area), there is not just room to grow into said morality: but over time, personal growth and reflection to better conform to the tenets of the faith is more or less expected. It's a central part of the whole thing. No one is born a saint, same as no one is born a hero in ancient myths (they might be born with a great fighting body and fantastic reflexes: but the hero part comes from them surviving their struggles, and growing with them).
Contrast that to the average woke mob: you are not supposed to think, you are not supposed to question anything. And you are not supposed to be an identifiable individual. I mean, you might be, but no one cares if you are. The world is black and white, all you need to do is bring the pitchforks and torches, and go with the hate du jour.
Basically, this is the same underlying reason why Communist societies had this uniquely soul-destroying quality: if everything that happens is due to societal processes that are statistical in nature, you as an individual might as well go and hang yourself in the attic - no one cares, you are just an infinitesimally small part of a machine that does not care about you in particular. Yeah, people were supposed to become better socialists, so there were societal education programmes of sorts that went in that direction. But these efforts pretty much always aimed at making people assimilate in society, and put their personal desires second. Or last. Your growth as a personality was of no concern to anyone, or anything - just like in the woke mob.
That's well argued. You make an interesting point (I am also a layman in the humanities, but even if the professions beat you to it, I didn't read them and I did read you!)
If you're thinking of reviewing Hanania's book on the grounds of wokeness being an outgrowth of Civil Rights law (rather than on the grounds that Hanania is also a Substacker, deeply obnoxious, and the two of you have some overlap in fan groups and possibly social circles), you might want to take a look at Christopher Caldwell's Age of Entitlement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Entitlement:_America_Since_the_Sixties) which presents the same thesis but has the advantage of not being written by Hanania. That said, Hanania's book probably has more recent content (Caldwell's released in early 2020 but I think the bulk of it stopped around 2015-2016) that may be of interest but would also be... polarizing.
..."i saw Satan fall like lightning" was Jesus responding to his disciples coming back with joy at how they could perform exorcisms in His name. They had been sent out to preach to the cities under His authority, and part of that was having his ability to exorcise delegated. Jesus was just commenting on their success.
Trying to isolate a single verse from its context is called proof-texting and its very common with the Bible. Frustrating too.
if i understood right, i think mimetic desire is more basic. The natural end of man is to explode in mass violence. To prevent this, we have created a form of cartharsis through the creation of scapegoats. A scapegoat "bears the sins of the world" and enables people to throw their violence onto an object, ritually purging it for a time.
its a common motif of horror films. The Cabin in the Woods for example. There's an old anime called Kakurenbo that does it well. When the game is over, the city's lights go back on...for a while. Now YOU are it.
Jesus i think enables people to transcend this because of an eternal scapegoat. he both called it to attention and exists as an eternal unchanging victim to sacrifice desire on until it is taken away by eternity. Only a divine can bear it for all mankind for all time.
i think wokeness and anti-wokeness is just the return of the scapegoat in weaker forms. Christianity has mediated it for a long time, but without the whole message paganism
reasserts itself. Even with it it still exists, but we are kind of aware only jesus is a true scapegoat, others are not. So there is guilt.
the removal of this will end up in a world where we will see less and less people criticizing cancelling. we will just return to overflowing desire-scapegoating-catharsis as a cycle almost uncontrollable.
there is a second answer that Girard probably doesn't want to think of. Christianity will end scapegoating when Jesus comes back to draw the curtain on history. back to prooftexting-minetic desire is a philosopher looking at sin, and Christianity posits a future world where sin nature itself is destroyed.
the pagan alternative is judgement without heaven, the gods die. may also be a danger are fear to make people tremble, i guess.
The reviewer exposes a bias when they assume Girard is a "good Catholic". I got the feeling the reviewer found no value in this explanation of desire. One experiment with children, for example, found that if you have ten kids in one room with ten identical toys then, instead of each rationally taken one toy, they tend to hang-back until one toy is identified as desirable. I found Girard to be translational to Iroquois torture ceremonies, and Jean-Michel Oughourlian, in The Puppet of Desire, found explanations for the well-documented Loudun possessions. The popularity of short stories like The Harvest also depend on this idea of community and sacrifice. In any case, I think we can all agree that we have needs or requirements (e.g., air, water, food, and shelter), but the next step to needing others is tricky. Of course, the baby needs the adult, and astronauts need rocket scientists, but what do relationships mean in general and particular?
Just mentioning there was a formal study - I thought the examples already given were anecdotal about stereotypes, which can be good evidence, but I wanted to reference the particular study with 10 kids. Love your work. Didn't know you were the reviewer. I don't want more than what you're already doing! tx,
"The reviewer exposes a bias when they assume Girard is a "good Catholic".
I wondered about that bit too, since I've learned to twitch every time someone is described in the media as a "devout/good Catholic". But it looks like Girard at least put the spade work in, so he may not be a raving heretic. Or I should say "may not have been", seems he died in 2015 so God rest the man:
"During the beginning of his career as lecturer, Girard was assigned to teach courses on European literature; he admits he was not at all familiar with the great works of European novelists. As Girard began to read the great European novels in preparation for the course, he became especially engaged with the work of five novelists in particular: Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky and Proust.
His first book, Mensonge Romantique et Vérité Romanesque (1961), is a literary comment on the works of these great novelists. Until that time, Girard was a self-declared agnostic. As he researched the religious conversions of some of Dostoyevsky’s characters, he felt he had lived a similar experience, and converted to Christianity. Ever since, Girard has been a committed and practicing Roman Catholic."
Somebody has a piece up coming from a theological angle on this, and I have to say I find it fascinating, it makes me very interested in Girard's notion of sacrifice:
"René Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2010), 47. “Christianity has always known that this reconciliation was impossible: it is why Christ said he brought war not peace. Did Christianity predict its apocalyptic failure? A reasonable argument can be made that it did. This failure is simply the same thing as the end of the world. From this point of view, one could argue that the verse “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” is still too full of hope. The revelation has failed: in a certain manner it has not been heard.”
"In archaic rituals, individuality and differentiation are often suppressed. For example, Girard points out that in archaic rituals such as the Dionysiac bacchanal, the consummation of wine and other intoxicating substances “facilitate the abandonment of personal identities and help induce the hallucinatory atmosphere associated with a heightened practice of mimesis.”[35] The purpose of this is to unite people and bring about peace.[36]
[35] Michael Joseph Darcy, “René Girard, Sacrifice, and the Eucharist” (Duquesne University, 2016) 108–109. Here Darcy is referencing Girard’s analysis of the Dionysiac bacchanal found in Violence and the Sacred, 136.
[36] “The rite is not oriented towards violence, but toward peace” (René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory [Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977], 136)."
I should apologise here to Peter Gerdes, this article makes me understand a little better his frustration with the Continental philosophical approach as he sees it, but I think it's pretty clear that Girard is working as much off mystic theology as philosophy which of course is going to be both frustrating and aggravating to someone who wants to map philosophy out as a science like physics, in the same way as physics. Just the facts, ma'am!
I have to thank Scott, too, for introducing me to this man; as I said, I previously ignored him because I thought it was just more social science/social psychology trendy theory. If I go by this review of the 2009 collected interviews, Girard was indeed a committed Christian and a follower of apophatic theology:
"“God’s withdrawal is thus the passage in Jesus Christ from reciprocity to relationship, from proximity to distance… Christ questioned [God’s] silence on the cross, and then he himself imitated his Father’s withdrawal by joining him on the morning of his Resurrection. Christ saves humanity by ‘breaking his solar scepter.’ He withdraws at the very point when he could dominate. We in turn are thus required to experience the peril of the absence of God, the modern experience par excellence, because it is also a redemptive experience. To imitate Christ is to refuse to impose oneself as a model and to always effaced oneself before others. To imitate Christ is to do everything to avoid being imitated… The death of the gods, which so frightens Nietzsche, is simply the same thing as an essential withdrawal in which Christ asks us to see the new face of the divine. Mimetic theory has allowed us to conclude that the purpose of the Incarnation was to finish all religions, whose sacrificial crutches had become ineffective… The more God’s silence grows, the more dangerous violence becomes, as the vacuum is filled by purely human means though now devoid of the sacrificial mechanism. And, by the same token, the more holiness emerges as a distance from the divine.”
*Way* more interesting than the simplistic notion I had of "oh, yet another social philosopher yakking about evo-psych".
Thanks for the references. The Catholic symbols naturally lend themselves to Girard's ideas, but Girard also wrote that there must be a kind of “conversion experience,” which “always retains the form of the great religious experiences”; then he adds that “[t]his kind of experience can be found in the great oriental religions. But there the aim is to allow the individual to escape completely from the world and its cycles of violence by an absolute renunciation of all worldly concerns, a kind of living death”. Hinduism and Buddhism are most probably the “great oriental religions” he had in mind. Jean-Michel Oughourlian took-up Girard's ideas without having any religious affiliation as far as I know. I am also reminded that Merlin Donald promoted a mimetic theory of speech origins in his cognitive studies, a "watershed adaptation allowing humans to function as symbolic and cultural beings" with no mention of Girard.
If I understand correctly, Girard seems to use the frequency of single-victim myths to argue that it arises from deep-seeded aspect of human pyschology. But many of the examples he uses are from Indo-European cultures. Comparative mythologists will tell you that these myths are common and similar because they have the same proto-Indo-European ancestor. So it's not lots of different cultures sharing a common mythological trope, but lots of related cultures remembering a shared ancestral mythological trope.
Admittedly, that doesn't explain why the same trope is (seemingly) common among Semitic cultures, but one of the things I've learned recently is that ancient people moved around a *lot* more than I naively used to think. So maybe this reflects cultural trade or some older shared cultural ancestor.
That was pretty much my reaction. Specifically, the "Manu[s] and Yemo" creation myth that's thought to be the origin of the "creating the world from a primal sacrifice" trope. Odin killing Ymir and Romulus killing Remus are both accepted as descendants of the Manus and Yemo legend: Ymir is Yemo, as is Remus (via "Yemos" in Proto-Latin).
Semitic and other non-Indo-Europeans Middle Eastern cultures had a lot of contact with Indo-Europeans fairly early on, particularly Medes, Persians, and proto-Greeks, and there was definitely a ton of cross-pollination in both language and mythology over the millenia.
Ironically, the descent of multiple myths from a single proto-Indo-European myth suggests, that, while there wasn't an actual primal sacrifice, there must have been a first, primal, poet/priest/mythmaker/storyteller who came up with the _story_ in the first place... ( As opposed to multiple independent inventions if there were something in human psychology that made independent myths converge on one stable attractor )
That's a really good point. Even if there were multiple authors layering multiple story elements on top of one another to produce the final myth framework, that still means a small number of authors at most and each author is the originator of one or more major elements.
I really like Girard and I believe that his work is a big deal even though the rational conclusion from it is not what he believed and even thought he exaggerated a lot. He shows the social usefulness of religion, that means that religion is practiced because of its usefulness not because it is true. Christianity being a bit more true does not change this. But it is still a big deal - it is a religion that retains social usefulness but is closer to reality allowing for more rationality in mainstream discourse.
I don't know what you mean by Christianity being a bit more true. Sure, Jesus probably existed and probably got executed... but that's not really that impressive. For all we know, his disciples could have absolutely butchered his teachings.
By more true I meant that it reveals the scapegoat process, while other religions hide it. Here Girard insists on universality of that assertion but I am not so sure.
Yes, the final step of Girard's system is to paint Christianity as the ultimate antidote against this otherwise destabilizing process - even though by this late point he seems to concede that Christian message also ends up eating itself somehow.
Let's review the cycle: 1) innate capacity for desire => 2) mimetic desire (object copied from others) => 3) mimetic tension => 4) blame => 5) scapegoating => 6) catharsis.
Girard himself insists on how Cristianity (incidentally his own religion) powerfully counteracts step 5, by pointing out the truth that the victim is innocent. As Scott says: The Son of God brought from Heaven to Earth a single Word of the ineffable Divine speech, and that word was “VICTIM”.
So as part of steelmanning the man, it's interesting to see how most other successful religions appear to converge on trying to counteract the Girardian process. The interesting part is that they seem to tackle it at different parts of the cycle.
Early Buddhism is nothing if not a sustained attack on desire itself (see: skeleton meditation), so it goes straight for the root at step 1. Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism all insist on "love thy neighbor" (metta in Buddhist terms), which indirectly counteracts steps 3-4-5. Hinduism has a strong component of doing your own duty ("swadharma") while de-emphasizing personal desire ("nishkamya karma") or caring about what others want, which goes for step 2. Daoism is apparently unique in going straight for step 4; the Zhuang Zi just goes on and on presenting paradoxes that leave you confused about who is wrong or right, undermining any possibility of righteous blame.
I can't think of anything insightful to say about Islam at this point - maybe someone more familiar can help? Maybe the hugely legalistic hadith system is another way of keeping people well differentiated in their own lanes too?
Sometimes reality is simple and we just make it complicated because we can't face the truth.
The question of our era is, in a post-Christian world, how do you handle the idea of groups of humans not being equal to each other?
After the disaster of Nazi ideology (a post-Christian belief system), and with the threat of communism (another post-Christian belief system) on the rise, something had to be done.
But we had no moral framework that could handle the issue.
So, we punted.
How did we solve this moral conundrum? We simply lied.
We told everyone that race was just skin deep. Those behavior patterns people had noticed between genetically similar groups and the differences in IQ? All caused by social factors. 100%. Nothing genetic. In fact, it was actually impossible for it be genetic because of [whatever excuse is popular]. Lucky for us!
The philosophical issue of equality between groups goes away if you just tell everyone that all groups are equal! Problem solved.
This worked for a while - several decades in fact. The downsides were massive damage to American cities, trillions lost on social programs that didn't work and a racial demographic change that we couldn't stop (on account that it would be racist).
But eventually, the lie catches up to you. The public started to demand answers to why equality wasn't happening. And then - boom - the Great Awokening.
I think those that make it complicated believe that a solution requires examination of why the belief in equality came into being, why and how it's been sustained. That is, the idea of equality is a symptom, not the first problem as it is to you.
The problem is that this nation was founded on this very lie.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Obviously the founding fathers weren't naive enough to actually believe this, considering they didn't even give all men the right to vote. Regardless, the sentiment persisted, and it ultimately lead to this mess.
But what should we do about it? In my opinion, nothing. Nothing more than what we're already doing, anyways. We're already approaching a turning point in human history. And with it will come a paradigm shift. We can only hope that things change for the better.
"We're already approaching a turning point in human history. And with it will come a paradigm shift."
What do you have in mind?
( Personally, I suspect that AI is in the process of getting successful enough to create large changes - but technical projects can always fail, and AI _does_ have a history of hype... )
It's mostly just that things are looking pretty bleak for humanity right now. As you said, AI is the biggest threat. Assuming they keep improving, AIs will heavily disrupt modern society through its ability to heavily optimize processes, removing a lot of slack from society (see Scott's old post for why that's bad for humans: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditations-on-moloch#III_ ). Of course, there's also always the chance that they go rogue and try to kill humans for any number of reasons. They'd need to be pretty intelligent to pull it off, but it seems exceeding likely that even a non-sentient AI can do some major damage. And if anyone's stupid enough to make a *sentient* super-intelligence, it will certainly remove humanity from the face of the Earth, even if it does love us.
Then there's also the fact that we're living through a sixth mass extinction event, and climate change (assuming it isn't mitigated) will cause a migration crisis and resource shortages, which then have the potential to further exacerbate tensions between global powers, who all have nukes... You get the idea.
If humanity does end up surviving all of that, things are going to end up looking very, very different. Humans have a habit of becoming much more pragmatic when it is required of them.
the reason why we believe all men are equal is because the alternative way ends up being "some men are masters, some men are slaves." You can couch it in things like IQ, as if the lot of you wouldn't cry if you were told "no, your IQ is too low for a masters degree, why not run a plumbing business instead?" but its always a temptation to use science as a rubber stamp God.
the sins of equality are light compared to that. A lot of people aren't honest about their capacity for evil, and couch it in good.
But does anyone *actually* believe that all people are equal? People clearly place different value on different lives, and no one seems to have any problem with people having widely different life outcomes depending on said value (except communists, of course). Even you seem to imply that plumbers are lesser than people with college educations...
Also, that's how master's degrees are supposed to work. They exist to signify mastery, as its name implies. If anyone was able to earn one, that would defeat their entire purpose.
the plumber and master's degree things are to show that the people holding those views expect to be the rulers, not the ones ruled or limited. its a good exercise to think of being jailed in the prison you build for others.
as for value yes we are all equal simply to protect one another. again, masters and slaves, and it is just as easy to send intellectuals to the gulag as laborers. or to the noose. Equality will create far less evil than otherwise; men are more likely to enslave than forbear each other's weaknesses.
I mean, literally "all people are equal"? I'd say vast majority of people doesn't, some do but they're kind of extreme. The whole "IQ is fake" thing is really unconvincing, obviously intelligence is a thing. But "people are unequal in predictable ways that correlate with observable somatic characteristics" is a much, much stronger claim, and much more problematic. Without it you have a simple policy: *treat* everyone as equal, give them the same opportunities, and see who comes out on top. No need to give anyone special status. If they're better (morally or intellectually), it'll be self-evident.
I AM its prophet, for I am the Truth and the Truth is INFINITE! Actually, you are the Truth also, and so is everyone, Infinitism is a massively distributed religion.
Scott sorry if my earlier remark sounded like I was taking a shot at you, I meant Girard but realize I was very unclear. I appreciate how you reviewed it.
"Most (all?) human desire is mimetic, ie based on copying other people’s desires. The Bible warns against coveting your neighbor’s stuff, because it knows people’s natural tendencies run that direction. It’s not that your neighbor has particularly good stuff. It’s that you want it because it’s your neighbor’s. Think of two children playing in a room full of toys. One child picks up Toy #368 and starts playing with it. Then the other child tries to take it, ignoring all the hundreds of other toys available. It’s valuable because someone else wants it."
There are at least three possibilities:
1) Yeah, some of this is accurate as it stands
2) Some human desires, "hunger and thirst and venery" are rooted in biology and would exist even if there were no one nearby to copy
3) Copying can sometimes occur without conflict. A child picking up Toy #368 makes Toy #368's characteristics more salient to child #2. If there happen to be two copies of it, child #2 may pick up copy #2. Not all goods are rivalrous or in short supply. The adult version of this can be "adopting best practices" (or, if someone insists on a negative spin, "cultural appropriation").
I too am skeptical of the whole scapegoating thing. If this were a common occurence in the ancient world, why is it so hard to conceptualize how and why it all worked, and why arent' modern examples more prevalent?
My intuition here is that what Scott/Girard are describing as the single-victim-process is actually just a normal conflict resolution process that involves mythmaking between different factions.
So, to posit an example: take some powerful authority figure like a king or a high priest, and let's say a coalition forms in opposition to the king. Some of them have what they believe are legitimate grievances against the king and others just want to usurp his power. They kill the king and one of their number assumes power. Naturally, the king's loyal supporters and friends are outraged and demand justice. They will likely be pushing narratives about how the king was a swell guy and didn't deserve to be offed in order to rally people who were on the fence to their side. Meanwhile, the new ruling faction will be doing the opposite: they'll be demonizing the king to anyone who will listen. To solidify the new ruling faction's grip on power and avoid a counter-coup or civil war, they strike a deal with the old ruling faction, and maybe one concession they make is to the other side's narrative: actually, the dead king was a pretty swell dude. Or he sacrificed himself so that a new regime could be born peacefully and lead us to an exciting new future, and whatever other kind of crap might be necessary to placate the losers.
In other words, I suspect that if the phenomenon Girard is describing here is real, then what's actually going on is that people are constructing myths about some event after the fact to hide or avoid confronting that it was just another case of "the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must."
"In other words, I suspect that if the phenomenon Girard is describing here is real, then what's actually going on is that people are constructing myths about some event after the fact to hide or avoid confronting that it was just another case of "the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must."
The explanation even some Roman writers gave about the 'deification' of Romulus; no, he wasn't taken up to heaven and the gods, but he was assassinated by senators and his body hidden and they lied about "so he disappeared in a cloud and went to the gods, honest, would we lie to you?"
"After a reign of thirty-seven years, Romulus is said to have disappeared in a whirlwind during a sudden and violent storm, as he was reviewing his troops on the Campus Martius. Livy says that Romulus was either murdered by the senators, torn apart out of jealousy, or was raised to heaven by Mars, god of war. Livy believes the last theory regarding the legendary king's death, as it allows the Romans to believe that the gods are on their side, a reason for them to continue expansion under Romulus' name."
Livy, History of Rome:
"After these immortal achievements, Romulus held a review of his army at the ‘Caprae Palus’ in the Campus Martius. A violent thunder storm suddenly arose and enveloped the king in so dense a cloud that he was quite invisible to the assembly. From that hour Romulus was no longer seen on earth. When the fears of the Roman youth were allayed by the return of bright, calm sun-shine after such fearful weather, they saw that the royal seat was vacant. Whilst they fully believed the assertion of the Senators, who had been standing close to him, that he had been snatched away to heaven by a whirlwind, still, like men suddenly bereaved, fear and grief kept them for some time speechless. At length, after a few had taken the initiative, the whole of those present hailed Romulus as ‘a god, the son of a god, the King and Father of the City of Rome.’ They put up supplications for his grace and favour, and prayed that he would be propitious to his children and save and protect them. I believe, however, that even then there were some who secretly hinted that he had been torn limb from limb by the senators - a tradition to this effect, though certainly a very dim one, has filtered down to us. The other, which I follow, has been the prevailing one, due, no doubt, to the admiration felt for the man and the apprehensions excited by his disappearance. This generally accepted belief was strengthened by one man's clever device. The tradition runs that Proculus Julius, a man whose authority had weight in matters of even the gravest importance, seeing how deeply the community felt the loss of the king, and how incensed they were against the senators, came forward into the assembly and said: ‘Quirites! at break of dawn, to-day, the Father of this City suddenly descended from heaven and appeared to me. Whilst, thrilled with awe, I stood rapt before him in deepest reverence, praying that I might be pardoned for gazing upon him, ‘Go,’ said he, ‘tell the Romans that it is the will of heaven that my Rome should be the head of all the world. Let them henceforth cultivate the arts of war, and let them know assuredly, and hand down the knowledge to posterity, that no human might can withstand the arms of Rome.’’ It is marvellous what credit was given to this man's story, and how the grief of the people and the army was soothed by the belief which had been created in the immortality of Romulus."
I think Girard would agree, but that the interesting point is that the victim - formerly the scorned, the shameful, the wicked, the cause of all strife and evil - is then deified and glorified *after* sacrifice/execution. Why do we do that? Romulus is hated by his political rivals and then murdered by them; why is he then declared Father of the City and a god? Livy's explanation is that the people *needed* that comfort, and in order to prevent further violence and breakdown of order, someone in authority stepped forward to say he had seen the new god.
Girard could see there that the act of violence - of scapegoating - acted in fact as a unifying deed, to confirm the Romans in their belief as their destiny to be a conquering force, and imposed order and peace. So the sacrifice *worked*, and the envy of the senators was transformed into something that broke - for a while - the mimesis, so that desire for taking the goods of one's neighbour was quenched.
Of course, then the Romans went off and took *other* people's goods, but the civic peace was obtained and the envy burned up, as it were. By a royal and holy sacrificial victim.
Right, but consider that after a 37 year reign, you're not going to be able to convince anyone Romulus was actually a cruel tyrant the whole time and his cruel death was deserved. That dog just won't hunt, so you have to fall back on assigning a sort of meaning to his life/death that it didn't actually have.
If I'm reading Scott's review correctly, Girard is saying that scapegoats serve to defuse tensions between different factions or individuals that exist due to mimetic rivalry, but in this case at least, Romulus cannot be said to be a scapegoat. He had what other people wanted, namely wealth and power, and when that was forcibly taken from him, the myth making went into overdrive to preserve the social fabric. That's just a different scenario than what Girard is describing, I would say. I guess my contention, which I can't prove, is that the Romulus scenario is probably the much more common than what Girard is describing.
Well, Romulus has become the object of envy and emulation; the senators want what he has but can't get it because of course only one person can be the king. So that's the mimetic desire at work to cause trouble: if they were content to be his inferiors, they wouldn't have worked to take away from him what he possessed. In a sense, Romulus is 'blameworthy' because he has made himself such a target and has accumulated so much power (and he's not a stainless personality, from the killing of his own brother to the plotting to carry off the Sabine women to inviting in all the dispossessed to join the fledgling colony of Rome, he has accrued a lot of unrighteousness).
Hailing him as a divinity is the way then to expiate (or hide) their own guilt and preserve the social order, as you say. And this divinisation can only safely be done *after* his murder. So he also acts as the ritual sacrificial victim between men and the gods.
Yes, I do think mimetic desire is a useful concept. However, in Girard's formula, the killing of the scapegoat is supposed to defuse the conflicts mimetic desire creates, but that's the part I think is contestible. That's not what happens here, though; the killing of the king is what inflames tensions and threatens the social fabric in the first place. The post hoc myths they attribute to the king and his life/death are what actually defuses the conflict, not the killing itself.
Plus, as I alluded to before, a scapegoat can be chosen almost at random, because the purpose is to foist blame on someone who can't defend themselves. Romulus is hardly a random person. He was killed specifically for the power and position he possessed.
People are getting very bogged down in arguments of definition over the word “woke” rather than focusing on the profound cultural shift that’s happened over the past couple decades, which is the pivot from descriptive postmodernism to authoritarian postmodernism. You see this in thinkers like Foucault being interesting in describing Hegelian master-slave dialectics in contrast to the contemporary turn to dismantling Hegelian master-slave dialectics. 1960’s era Critical Theory was descriptive postmodernism, whereas things like Critical Fat Studies / Critical Race Theory / Critical Gender Studies all fall into the authoritarian postmodern camp.
Foucault was interested in the way that power and knowledge feedback into each other. It took Foucault hundreds of pages to say what Yudowsky would summarize as “The map is not the territory.” Foucault argues that the map is produced by the people in power and explores the ways that language and institutions shape our maps. This is descriptive postmodernism.
The recent iterations of Critical X Theory agree that the map is not the territory, but the map produced by the people in academia is the morally correct map, and asking about facts (the territory) is a weapon of the cishet-white-supremacist patriarchy (the masters), and if you don’t follow the morally correct map, then you aren’t factually false, you’re morally evil. It becomes a moral duty to replace the map produced by the people in power with the map produced by liberal arts professors/activists, and questioning this new map is “perpetrating harm.” This is authoritarian postmodernism. You can call that cultural turn “woke” if you want.
A couple quotes from the review that stood out to me:
> If you’re concerned about the influence of wokeness on society, you should be more interested in things like…anti-free-speech policies, journals refusing to publish politically incorrect scientific results, or colleges forcing students to take diversity classes
Agreed. Descriptive postmodernism is an exploration of the ways that subtle things like language shape our maps. Authoritarian postmodernism is saying, “You will use the the language I want you to use or I’m going to punish you.”
> It believes that social systems must be seen through the lens of oppressors persecuting victims, and all political positions must be reduced to siding with victims as much as possible.
Yes, we aren’t just describing these systems as a scientist would, but exploiting them as an engineer would. This is the transition from a theoretical description of social systems to an authoritarian version of postmodernism that applies these observations.
I want to separate my claim from another claim that is often made about wokeness: that it is nothing but a bid for power. I think this claim is orthogonal from what I am saying here about the authoritarian nature of it. It’s possible you could be woke and be genuinely concerned about the things you’re saying, or you could also be doing it as a bid for power. Surely there are some people in the social justice movement who are genuinely trying to make the world better and surely there are grifters just like in every movement. There have been a lot of altruistic, goodhearted people in the history of the world who thought authoritarianism would make things better. If you genuinely believed that anyone who holds different beliefs than you was causing harm you might get feisty too.
The complete obliteration of the professor/activist divide is a major feature of the shift you are mentioning, methinks. It is nowadays expected and nearly demanded that members of academia be active in the politically preapproved manners and that doing so is pretty much a prerequisite for the production of valid ("morally correct") knowledge.
It says this in the requirements, “We request that candidates include in their cover letter information about how they have contributed to the building of a broadly inclusive educational environment and how they imagine doing so at NYU.”
On the surface, I think “building of a broadly inclusive educational environment” sounds like a great thing. In practice, it means that not only must you subscribe to a very ideologically specific set of beliefs, but also that you must be able to show real world activism based on those beliefs.
I am dubious about engaging the issue of woke-ness from such lofty heights.
A great elucidation of cancel culture comes from Lukianoff and Schlott (The cancelling of the American Mind). It is the product of decades of ground level observations, and makes it abundantly clear that mob violence in many forms underly the changes that you state have gone through “normal liberal procedures” . To actually work, these depend on the type of free debate that cancel culture is so successful at undermining. If you don’t agree with the term mob violence, I encourage you to explore the examples they give and come up with a better term.
They also point to factors that go beyond the dynamic of the mob to additional contributing psycho-social factors, some of which are new.
Of course ideology also enters the picture, and you could get to myth from there, but here I would say that caring for victims is not the central issue, it is what constitutes victimhood that has been redefined.
To the idea of the sacrificed body I add the Indian notion of the universe as a sacrifice - maybe the highest manifestation of these types of myths.
That very ending caption, "These are among the many questions of mine that ISSFLL fails to answer"... that reminded me of the whole "mystery as the point" thing. Almost too big for a trope, like a meta-trope (yeah yeah INB4...)
The narrow version is when Yudkowsky noticed people "worshipping their own ignorance", and the broader version is... ahh I don't have a really-coherent paragraph here (yet?), but y'know how some of the best Art is like "in touch with the great mystery" or "the Universe" or "the void" or whatever? That, that thing. I hereby point at that and say "perhaps related?" without answering that question (yeah yeah INB4...)
IIRC "Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World" is supposed to be a more in-depth work by Girard on this topic? Haven't really read it, but maybe it answers (or semi-answers) the lingering questions.
Girard's theories fundamentally don't make sense. Weaker versions of mimetic theory do, but are better spelled out by cultural evolutionists (Heyes, Henrich, etc). I'm not sure if the scapegoat mechanism makes sense at all.
However, Girard's readings of literature and myth are often very interesting. At his best, he makes the dynamics of mimetic rivalry and the human propensity to imitate more salient. I think that's useful and have put it to use in the Shakespeare debate and reflections on Covid:
Great review! Extra virtue points for not strawmanning wokeness. I think you you've highlighted most of the issues with author's reasoning very well.
However, there is one that you didn't mention. How does the initial transition from mimetic desire to victimization even supposed to work?
Sure, people do tend to want stuff other people want. Does this lead to constant war of all vs all? Unless you are very generous with your definition of "war", so that it included any kind of competition between individuals - not really. But also, why would victimization help alleviate the mimetic desire? Okay, we've expelled a person. How is it supposed to prevent me from wanting stuff that my neighbour has?
And society isn't build as a result of the lack of mimetic desire. Even if we accept
the whole "status framing" - it's the opposite. Our civilization is founded on these silly status games. It exploits and perpetrate the desire of things other people agree are worth desiring. And yes some people can feel status boost through lowering status of others or just bullying the people with lowest status, but it's part of the vicious cycle, not an escape from it.
I haven't read Girard's book at all, just comments on it from other sites, but the sense I get is that Girard posits mimetic desire as somehow *flattening* society (which, after all, is built on differentiation) - if everybody wants the same thing, and is trying to get the same thing, this builds up tension. If we're no longer individuals but a glob of clones all striving to get the same status/item/wealth/whatever, then society breaks down.
See this complaint from the period of early Westernisation in Japan:
"Everyone has forgotten the righteous way. Now everyone is working for profit.... In the villagers we now have hairdressers and public baths. If you see houses you see flutes, shamisen and drums on display. Those living in rented houses, the landless and even servants have haori, umbrellas, tabi and clogs. When you see people on their way to the temple, they seem better dressed than their superiors."
That last bit - "people seem better dressed than their superiors" - is the mainspring of the tension. You can't tell where people 'belong', Jack is as good as his master, there is mixing and confusion. People that want and can't get, and people that had and now have lost, in the great equalisation of all the classes, are unhappy and aggrieved. Mob mentality develops.
Something has to give.
And by directing that energy onto the victim, the scapegoat - be it an internal enemy or someone deemed an outsider, a bearer of bad luck or actively malicious - the society 'drives out' the elements they consider sinful or unnatural or causing the disturbance. Violence is catharsis, and in the wake of catharsis is unity and identification with the common good: we have all acted together to do the right thing, we have done our duty, in this moment we are no longer envious of one another or striving to have more than we should.
It doesn't last, of course, because the same drives about "I want! I want!" are still present and start up again. Then people look back to the moment of unity with nostalgia, and even reverence (think of the way the British invoke 'the spirit of the Blitz') as a time of 'when all was as it should be' and that becomes easy to put it on a pedestal, and even treat the victims as somehow holy or at least possessing mana; something that is taboo can be harmful or beneficial, but it is marked out as possessing or being involved with spiritual power:
> the sense I get is that Girard posits mimetic desire as somehow *flattening* society
Yes this is the socially conservative standard consequence of buying Girard's framework of memetic tension. Anything that keeps people well differentiated helps their desires from flattening into the same thing and precipitating a crisis. So bring on traditional gender roles, hereditary guilds, caste systems, etc.
I haven't heard the argument made, but modern society seems to find its own ways of segregating people into buckets too. Back in the 70s, if you were "punk" you were not copying the desires of "hippies" and vice-versa. Same with jocks vs nerds, liberals vs conservatives, queer vs straight, etc. So maybe a Girardian should also support modern subcultures.
And now that I think of it, the current social-media environment has to be the ultimate test of memetic tension. Here we are, with our hugely varied real-world jobs and identities, yet the moment we join social media, the hyperoptimized machine channels as much of it can of our capacity to desire into a single gamified system of dopamine rewards from likes, followers and replies. If there's a place where, to a first approximation, everyone wants the same, social media is it. So if we agree with the reports that the whole thing becoming seriously toxic, and undermining the mental health of a whole generation, I think that's score one for Girardian memetic tension actually being a thing.
Let's see if any global scapegoats emerge out of Twitter or TikTok!
Memetic tension is too big a thing (like gravity) to attribute to a single voice like Girard's. Accordingly, breaking or easing such tension can follow many trajectories -- not just the conservative gender norms, caste systems, etc. I can think of all sorts of ways the current "single rewards system" you point to could be turned on its head overnight, quite possibly toward greater individuality than ever before.
> I get is that Girard posits mimetic desire as somehow *flattening* society
I'm not sure the proposed cause and effect mechanics here makes sense. It's not that complex societies naturally tend to be without any hierarchies so that people need to express constant effort against egalitarian entropy in order for civilization to work. Or rather, it may *feel this way* if you a conservative/reactionary who lives in 20-21st century, observing all the advances of modernity, but it's historically false. It took a lot of effort to arrive to a more egalitarian equilibrium - not very stable one, mind you, and every step in this direction was blood difficult. On the other hand, it should also mean that there is nearly no tension in rigid class systems, which is very much not the case.
Closer to the truth would be to say that flatter societies produce more mimetic desire. But even it, to a huge degree, would be commiting the good old "I don't see X = X doesn't exist" mistake. Mimetic desire is *more noticable* in flatter societies because people have the ability to actually satisfy it, at least partually. It doesn't mean that previously people didn't want to be better dressed. Now they just can afford it.
> And by directing that energy onto the victim, the scapegoat - be it an internal enemy or someone deemed an outsider, a bearer of bad luck or actively malicious - the society 'drives out' the elements they consider sinful or unnatural or causing the disturbance.
Some people indeed tend to get catharsis from violence and feel better by bullying others. Lets even assume, for the sake of argument, that it's some universal drive inside our psyche. This doesn't actually mean that it's connected to mimetic desire in any way.
An example. People have desire to eat. But also to have fun. And you can't exactly substitute one for another. Now if you satisfy the one desire of a person, for some time they are going to be happy about it in the moment. But it doesn't mean that the other desire went away.
> It doesn't last, of course, because the same drives about "I want! I want!" are still present and start up again.
Or maybe they do not start again, they were not eased in any way, in the first place, just previously the people were busy with other stuff - satisfying their other desires, which made their overal wellbeing appear to be less bad. But this exact desire also has to be satisfied.
"Or rather, it may *feel this way* if you a conservative/reactionary who lives in 20-21st century, observing all the advances of modernity, but it's historically false."
Y'know, I don't recognise conservatism in this description, and I see a lot of liberal takes of this nature: "the right want to bring back feudalism!" sort of rhetoric. Some conservatives, or self-described rightists, may well want that. Some of us just want "Can we stick to two or a maximum of three pronouns for the next ten minutes, please, until I get used to the New Thing?"
Anyway, even in the most egalitarian society - one of the ideal hunter-gatherer tribes that just spend an hour getting enough food to live and then loll around in leisure the rest of the day, as we're told happened before Bad Old Agriculture took hold - some are going to have different skills and talents. Grug will be better at making pots than me, so Grug is the tribe's pot-maker. Mog is the best hunter. Sek is the best at finding berries.
Girard in a sense is going along with Maslow's Hierarchy (though I don't know if he was familiar with it as such, and if I never see that damn pyramid again I will die happy) - once our basic needs are fulfilled, we want more.
"According to Maslow (1943, 1954), human needs were arranged in a hierarchy, with physiological (survival) needs at the bottom, and the more creative and intellectually oriented ‘self-actualization’ needs at the top.
Maslow argued that survival needs must be satisfied before the individual can satisfy the higher needs. The higher up the hierarchy, the more difficult it is to satisfy the needs associated with that stage, because of the interpersonal and environmental barriers that inevitably frustrate us.
Higher needs become increasingly psychological and long-term rather than physiological and short-term, as in the lower survival-related needs.
1. Physiological needs are biological requirements for human survival, e.g., air, food, drink, shelter, clothing, warmth, sex, and sleep.
2. Safety needs – people want to experience order, predictability, and control in their lives.
3. Love and belongingness needs refers to a human emotional need for interpersonal relationships, affiliating, connectedness, and being part of a group.
4. Esteem needs are the fourth level in Maslow’s hierarchy and include self-worth, accomplishment, and respect.
5. Self-actualization needs are the highest level in Maslow’s hierarchy, and refer to the realization of a person’s potential, self-fulfillment, seeking personal growth, and peak experiences."
So what I am getting from what others are saying about Girard, is that past level 1 and 2, people start to experience new wants/desires. They look around, they see others doing/having/achieving. This becomes desirable.
Why does anyone in the tribe want to be chief, after all? Some certainly won't want to be and are happy in their position. But others will want to be, because they see the position as desirable, because they mimic "what do my neighbours and circle of relationship want and desire?". Others will see that Grug is admired for their skill in pot-making, and will absorb the idea that "to be admired is desirable". People will then try and have what others have, be that material or status levels.
That introduces the tension, because not everybody *can* be the most skilled pot-maker or the chief or what have you. Remember, we're not even talking about hierarchy here, we're talking about "everyone is a happy hunter-gatherer where nobody is better than anybody else and all the decisions are made by consensus sitting around and talking about it" - but people will still *want* admiration, respect, being liked, being popular, the attention, the preferential treatment and the rest of it.
Girard says we learn to desire by imitating others. I think he's on to something there. There are things I absolutely don't care a straw about, but I see others caring about them - because they're imitating desire of Be Like Kim Kardashian or Get On Reality TV Show or Fifteen Minutes of Fame. This has nothing to do with satisfying basic needs! I don't think there's an inherent evo-psych drive to Be Reality TV Star! But there *is* societal and cultural desire that we imbibe as to "this is what you should want".
"Some people indeed tend to get catharsis from violence and feel better by bullying others. Lets even assume, for the sake of argument, that it's some universal drive inside our psyche. "
It's not even about bullying. We do have a natural tendency, when things go wrong or seem to be going wrong, to look around for a reason. What is to blame? Who is to blame?
Look at the idea of structural racism. What or who is to blame there? Well, everyone, according to the first definition I pulled up:
"Structural racism refers to the totality of ways in which societies foster racial discrimination through mutually reinforcing systems of housing, education, employment, earnings, benefits, credit, media, health care and criminal justice. These patterns and practices in turn reinforce discriminatory beliefs, values and distribution of resources, according to Zinzi Bailey, ScD, MSPH, et al."
So, do we just shrug and say "Nothing to be done about that"? No, we don't get that option:
“The AMA recognizes that racism in its systemic, structural, institutional, and interpersonal forms is an urgent threat to public health, the advancement of health equity, and a barrier to excellence in the delivery of medical care. The AMA opposes all forms of racism. The AMA denounces police brutality and all forms of racially motivated violence. The AMA will actively work to dismantle racist and discriminatory policies and practices across all of health care.”
You see? There has to be Recognition of the problem. There has to be Action. Policies. Opposition to the Bad Thing. Actively working to dismantle.
Oh, and there are villains we can recognise!
"Policies, practices and norms created to maintain white supremacy are forms of structural racism, said Ruth Enid Zambrana, PhD, distinguished university professor and interim chair, Department of Women's Studies, director, Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity, and adjunct professor, family medicine, University of Maryland Baltimore School of Medicine."
All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God - I mean, perpetuating structural racism:
"“I think it was important for us to explicitly name and recognize that there was racism baked into our system, and it was accepted as normal. It wasn't just oh, it's baked in and we recognize, and we can do these things. It's accepted as normal. We can really have well-meaning liberal types, even people of color who could be perpetuating racism on a structural level, while aiming to quote, unquote reduce disparities.”
This doesn't have to be about "I enjoy bullying and violence". It can be about "Something is wrong, things are not as they should be, there is Evil out there and we must act to extirpate it".
Identify the White Supremacists and kick them out and make sure they are rendered powerless. That's catharsis. That's the ritual scapegoat which carries all our sins and unites us in common purpose.
> Y'know, I don't recognise conservatism in this description
You were the one who sent me the piece about Japan Westernization.
> I see a lot of liberal takes of this nature
Sure. My point wasn't that "Only conservatives worry over stuff". My point was that such worries are not justified when comming from conservatives.
> some are going to have different skills and talents. Grug will be better at making pots than me, so Grug is the tribe's pot-maker. Mog is the best hunter. Sek is the best at finding berries.
I agree.
> So what I am getting from what others are saying about Girard, is that past level 1 and 2, people start to experience new wants/desires. They look around, they see others doing/having/achieving. This becomes desirable.
With you so far.
> Girard says we learn to desire by imitating others.
To a significant degree, we do.
How is any of it relevant to scapegoating, though? You're just describing things that fit the framework of mimetic desire. But you do not address my critique, that there isn't actually any connection between it and scapegoating, that it can be just two completely unrelated mechanisms.
I feel like you were gesturing at this, Scott, with your comment about the blood of Christian children. There is an oft-repeated pattern in history that Jewish people end up the scapegoats for whenever the social fabric falls into disrepair.
This seems very relevant to the current conflict and protests throughout the world. For me at least this has been the final proof that woke-ism is morally bankrupt. If you wouldn't say "n****r" when referring to a Black person, or "f****t" when referring to a gay person, how is it OK to chant "from the river to the sea," when many Jewish people have explicitly said that they interpret this as a call for genocide? Instead, the woke mob mansplain that it means something else. That's not even relevant! Who cares if "f****t" literally means "a bundle of sticks?" The important thing is how it's interpreted by the Jewish community, you a**holes.
Anyway, what's happening now strikes me as another episode in the long running trope "Jews are to blame for all the world's problems, let's kill a few thousand or million of them, then we'll feel bad about it later" except now the Jews have nuclear weapons and the anger and tension have nowhere to go. Like you, I really don't know how this gets resolved, and feel apprehensive about the future of world peace. I think also there's a strong chance Trump gets re-elected in 2024.
Half a million died in Syria, and no one marched to abolish the Syrian state. Heck, right now Sudan is worse then Gaza and seemingly no one has noticed
"People don’t use cancel culture to relieve mimetic tension - otherwise it would happen at times of mimetic tension, instead of whenever a celebrity is revealed to be bad."
I believe that one could make a credible case that we currently live in the most heightened time of mimetic tension in the history of mankind. At no point in history prior to the current moment were people actually able to tap into a 24/7 feed of what everyone they know and everyone they hear about on the media (also not a concept for most of human history!) is saying, doing and thinking.
The ability to tap into such a stream of information seems to me like something that would inordinately heighten how much we end up desiring things simply because "everyone else" seems to be desiring it. Or how we'd want to *be* like someone just because everyone else seems to want to be like them. "Influencer" has been the top most-desired profession for a while now, if I recall correctly.
I guess in this group of die-hard atheists, I have to be the one to state the obvious: Girard (the sincerely believing Catholic Christian) in fact *does* have a solution: repent and acknowledge Jesus as your Lord and Savior. The fact that rationalists find this so preposterous is just additional evidence for how uniquely bizarre Christianity is. Worse, it only works if everyone in society believes or pretends to believe. Wokeness is, indeed, what happens when concern for victims is separated from all the other Christian embroidery of humility, prayers, cathedrals and Popes. Girard's solution is for us to go back to believing the rest of the Christian story, which until the last hundred years most Westerners accepted as the background cost of ensuring civilization doesn't collapse.
I think as many as several people have tried becoming Christian and it hasn't solved wokeness.
The woke people becoming Christian might solve it (for some definition of Christian), but the woke people becoming liberal or Republican or Muslim or dead would also solve it. It doesn't seem that useful to note that we could stop a dangerous growing ideology if only everyone who held it converted to a different ideology.
Also, are we just going to ignore that even worse things happened under Christianity? Crusades, witch trials, inquisitions... There's no such thing as a religion of peace.
Even now we have stuff like the Budweiser cancellation, sorry "boycott", or DeSantis *explicitly* weaponizing government power to retaliate against criticism of government policy and being cheered on for it by all the people who supposedly support "free speech".
The problem with this is that god doesn’t exist and Jesus wasn’t his son. I couldn’t convert if I wanted to. An actual solution will be to find a replacement that doesn’t pin morality to factually incorrect underpinnings. Otherwise it’ll be just another matter of time until people realize the underpinnings are false and the morality has to be self-supporting again. Let’s just cut to the chase and pick a self-supporting morality that doesn’t rely on incorrect metaphysical claims.
I’m also deeply skeptical that Christianity is an antidote to victimhood gone overboard. Woke Christians are commonplace and the anti-woke comments in this thread don’t show much of the humility you tout. (Eg that you can’t understand why an atheist wouldn’t convert? Another below yours that claims Ukraine and Isreal have “Loser” mentalities? Not to mention the least-humble person, Trump.)
I haven't read Girard, but I like this idea. ~Everyday at work there's some problem, and after identifying the problem someone will often suggest a scapegoat. "Wayne must have taken it." (Even though we all know this is probably not the person to blame.) We have now 'assigned blame' and can get on with solving the problem. This is important because what we need to do is solve the problem. But as humans we somehow want to assign blame after identifying a problem. And using a known scapegoat let's us move past this step and get on with problem solving. Scapegoating is a time saver, we (mostly jokingly) agree on who's to blame and move on. (Why humans want to assign blame is perhaps a deep question.) The other type of problem at work is where person X comes up and says, "I broke this doing this." and you can get right into problem solving.
I figured it out when I saw this headline: “Ukraine says it has evidence of 109,000 Russian war crimes”.
You can say that *war* is a crime. But saying there are 100000 crimes is bureaucratic nonsense, done by a political movement that feels you win, not by winning, but by complaining.
This isn’t master morality v. slave morality. This is *Loser* morality. Good things and success are bad, and incompetence is good. There is no need for an oppressor; one’s personal incompetence and malfeasance is sufficient to gain the moral high ground.
So we have Israel and Hamas at war, but competing, not to kill each other, but to present an image of meekness and victimization to the world. We have a society where wealth is prima facie evidence of moral guilt.
Is it any wonder the world is insane, and on fire?
I think it's good to live in a society where gratuitous cruelty is discouraged. Even though, in the case of complicated conflicts like the two you mention, it is hard to figure out which cases are gratuitous cruelty and which are not and what path is best at discouraging gratuitous cruelty.
The loser morality as you describe it comes from slave morality. If you operate under a moral system that makes losers winners, you're going to get more losing and complaining and incompetence.
A common mistake here is to believe that people are insincere and lying about or exaggerating their own weakness to gain an advantage. It's more insidious: most people don't want to admit doing this, so they'll internalize it and believe themselves pathetic.
If you are looking for some more *ahem* intellectualy rigorous analysis of the Christianity --> modern morality topic, the historian Tom Holland has written a great and thoroughly readable book - Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_(Tom_Holland_book)
There’s also Rodney Stark’s _The Triumph of Christianity_ which makes the same point, that even the people who claim to hate (or not care about) Christianity base their worldview of rights, empathy, morals and so on upon Christian foundations.
In prehistoric times mimetic imitation must have often taken the grizzly form of literally wanting a piece of an esteemed person, in the hope and belief of acquiring some of their good qualities, like a sort of souvenir. Even in relatively recent times one only has to think of saints' relics, which included body parts such as bones and vials of blood.
The class of scapegoat myths overlaps with and segues into those of challenges or ordeals, from which the hero emerges triumphant. Christ in the wilderness being tempted by Satan, which he successfully resisted, Christ on the cross and dead for three days thereafter before ascending to Heaven, Odin hanged on the tree Yggdrasil for nine days, until at last he sees and understands the runes below the murky water, etc
> God (here meaning literal God, exactly as the average churchgoer understands Him) tried to break the reign of Satan (here meaning metaphorical Satan, the single-victim process) over the Jewish people, by constantly providing them with examples of the single-victim process being bad and ensuring those examples were written up accurately.
The trials of Job is a good example of your point, quoted above (as best I can with this utterly crap and almost non-existent substack formatting facility!).
Job's material prosperity also provides a hint of envy, which is first cousin to mimetic imitation!
Satan is chatting with God and the topic of Job arises:
>
>
And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.
And the Lord said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?
Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, Doth Job fear God for nought? Hast not thou made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land.
But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face.
And the Lord said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand. So Satan went forth from the presence of the Lord. ..
According to podcast science (so it may be false, but this is a fairy tale anyway), if you give an unavoidable random stressor to a rat, it will develop heart disease. Given another rat to bite, however, it will not. This is what Girard perhaps didn't fully understand. There is a _nonconservative current_ of pain that flows into us like entropy from our environment. We must have a place to put that pain, but we cannot reverse the irreversible. The destruction, therefore, is either directed inward or outward. There is no alternative. What appear to be alternatives are merely various strategies to turn that entropy on ourselves or on others, or, perhaps some lucky few, at best, find hiding places in dark, cool environments to avoid it somewhat. But the fundamental law remains. And some rage entirely against the tyranny of pain, thereby embracing it, becoming organic matter burning itself alive because a fiery escape has its own appeal.
Or we could work together to stop the sources of that pain coming into us _and_ others around us; after all if we just reflect our crap onto others, eventually, they'll bite back. I was raised Catholic, and the sensible stuff in the Bible always sounded like various ways of Jesus telling us, "Hey, if you want Heaven, here's how you get it: help each other, work real hard at it; trust me, eventually, things will get better." We're doing OK at it, honestly, and I credit a lot of that to technological advancement. Still, politics, humanities, arts, economics, these are all evolving fields and I hope there are still ways to develop them all in tandem to advance humanist / "non-ecstatic" Christian values.
That's the right idea! _Healthy_ companionship closes off one channel of entropy / stress. We can often work together to find ways to close off others - many more humans are sheltered and fed than ever before, and even as an old-school Leftist I can certainly give capitalism some credit for that - but then new challenges arise as well. We need some degree of stress to stay sane, our minds and bodies were wired by evolution with various hormetic response mechanisms proportionate to natural variations. How we will get to not zero stress, but optimal eustress, is very much an open question to say the least, lol.
Here's a theory of the roots of wokeness: It's hard to be religious these days, because science provides such convincing alternatives to god-based explanations of how the universe works and how people work. And technology is becoming more and more able to do things we used to believe only people could do. But there's a need to be religious, so people seized on on a secular belief that was sort of like religion -- liberalism -- and pumped it up like a Macy's Parade float until it was huge and godlike. It now furnishes believers with a way to be seen as good and a guide to how to live, and has the delicious bonus feature of allowing people to hate and destroy outsiders, via cancellation, without felling as though they are being cruel.
terms maybe, but if you have ever or do believe, theres sort of an individual "conversation with God" that has little to do with group identity. people go on too much about the benefits of religion and not the persecution that comes if you truly believe. in the strongest case this is where heresy or sects come from; the individual versus the social edifice which often is intensely weak.
i think with wokeness there is no individual conversation; its truly external which is why despite all the noise it has little impact at stopping racism. there really isnt a core for the individual to talk with or commit to. Like the role of personal prayer over mandated performance; part of the religious turmoil in the 60s imo was that people hungered for a personal not group based religion.
i guess i mean wokeness is more an impersonal thing; it cant tell YOU how to be good any more than trump hatred has caused the democrats to know how to govern well; too outwards.
honestly i was thinking and i think wokeness is a nervous reaction to the info flood of modern culture. like we are bombarded with israel and hamas info but most people don't have info defenses to realize to ignore things they have little power to change or affects them in no discernable way. or they couldn't make meaningful changes anyway; most people arent oppressing others.
so they get flooded with constant five minute crises and need to react nervously, but then forget just as fast. you feel a flow and swim
with or against the current.
answer may be moving out of flood country though and disengaging from constant info streams.
The more compelling story is that Western thought including liberalism itself was derived from and within the Christian worldview (for example, Locke believed that all humans are equal because God made it so), and became secularized as the empirical sciences demystified the world, keeping many of the Christian tenets while God was phased out. Jesus' "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God" became Bernie's "billionaires shouldn't exist".
Secularization meant that spiritual equality no longer sufficed and had to turn into equality in the material world. Unlike spiritual equality, material equality has to run up against the fact that people are in fact different, meaning that we had to invent fictions like "race is a social construct and any differences in group outcomes is fully a consequence of injustice".
My comment was too long for the algorithm so I had to post it on my own page but I guess it makes sense to post the first half so that readers can make an educated opinion about whether to read the rest of it.
Here's to hoping that the first half of the response is within the allotted character limit.
1.
"Someone with access to Heaven is going to have to give us a second divine Word."
I make no claim to being that person.
In fact I deny that such an individual is necessary.
The Torah (which I care enough about to have studied for sufficient decades to become an orthodox rabbi) says that God's Instruction is not in the heaven or across the sea but incredibly close to us - in our very mouths and hearts.
All that I am saying is what everybody already knows.
The Torah - and all righteous laws - demand that an individual who engages in some new form of socially dangerous activity be dealt with lest he infect others with "mimetic desires" who then go about doing likewise and in so doing, harm themselves and others.
Lacking human-instituted consequences The Torah isn't any kind of law at all but just a set of suggestions.
2.
When a single individual was found working on the Sabbath gathering sticks, nobody, including Moses had any idea what to do about it.
From Moses' perspective the whole thing was ridiculous. The weekend break from economic activity is *obviously* a good idea. And besides, hadn't he already shared God's Instruction not to covet your neighbor's life? Why would anyone violate the Sabbath just because this single moron did so? The Sabbath is *awesome*!
To you and I the social danger is obvious.
If this fellow were allowed to go on violating The Sacred Sabbath Rest then he would get richer, others *would* covet, and within a year "poof!" there goes the very concept of the weekend as all of mankind is once again reduced to inhumane, thoughtless slavery - just rats on a hamster wheel.
But Moses and Aaron were baffled. They had only recently delivered God’s Law and were at a loss about how to proceed when some fellow had idiotically violated it.
There's a paragraph break in Torah Scrolls at this point, likely intending to indicate the passage of time as Moses, Aaron and the congregation at large debate how to deal with The First Criminal.
After the break God arrives and tells Moses what to do.
Take him outside the camp and have the entire congregation stone him to death.
3.
Fast Forward 1,530 years.
Yehoshua of Natzeret (henceforth "Jesus") is making waves.
He's a simple fellow, of no great learning or parentage, certainly not any sort of god, and almost definitely a bastard.... continued here
agreed, it doesn't add much, but it does add a something. In the same way, anecdotal evidence is still evidence. Similar studies, somewhat tangent to Girardian ideas, are in the field of terror management theory. These investigators were able to test Becker's ideas, but, as you say, studies like this are difficult. I don't think that detracts from the ideas, and at least doesn't falsify them.
Seems silly to me to think of mimetic tension as the main force interfering with social bonds between people and social cohesion generally. Think about all the neighbors you have had, and all the neighbors your friends have had and talked about, and mentally list all the qualities neighbors can have that make you distrust or dislike them: The can be inconsiderate -- they play loud music late at night. They can be harsh and critical of you, complaining vociferously about small things you do. They can seem dangerous -- you can get glimpses of how they think and live that make you afraid they will rob you or attack you. They can be filthy and disgusting. They can be attractive and charming and flirtatious with your spouse, so that you fear you will lose your spouse to them. They can be needy and demanding, asking you frequently for little favors. They can be nosy. And, yes they can own such great stuff that you are chronically pained by jealousy. But the last reason seems to me both less common and less severe than other ways neighbors can make you unhappy, angry or worried.
I can't see an ounce of justification for pointing to jealousy as the main force that interferes with social bonds and makes people chronically angry and unhappy -- exact that there's a fancy, stylish phrase for jealousy: "mimetic tension." Maybe we just need some more stylish terms for all the other shit neighbors can do to spoil your day.
-filthy and disgusting neighbors -- Coprophilic Disaffiliation.
-needy and demanding: Philanthropic Pressor Stress
-seem like they might rob you or attack you: Thanatonic Encroachment Anxiety
Yes, well, Scott did basically agree: "Yeah, I think mostly crazy".
I think Girard is being remembered and somewhat reclaimed because the 1st step, what he called "mimetic desire", is a remarkable and under-appreciated insight. As others have said in this thread, it meshes really well with current theories of cultural evolution a la Henrich. Being wired to copy each other's desires (rather than just aping others' actions) may well be the force that got cultural evolution going in our species.
For anyone interested in a steelmanning of Girard, there's a guy called Jonathan Bi who seems to have made a bit of a career out of it. His explanations of this first step, and how it's significant, are very good.
Ted Gioia has a nice essay on his substack about using Girard-adjacent ideas to understand how cultural (and also economic) trends feed on themselves way beyond the point where they rationally make sense, which eventually provokes a strong opposite reaction. https://www.honest-broker.com/p/are-there-alternating-cycles-of-hot
The rest of the Girardian framework... I don't really follow. I think Scott himself in his blog(s) has given much more insightful descriptions of a whole variety of mechanisms of societal conflict, than this weird idea that "mimetic tension" is the universal culprit, and scapegoating the usual (but bad) solution.
>I think Girard is being remembered and somewhat reclaimed because the 1st step, what he called "mimetic desire", is a remarkable and under-appreciated insight.
Well - the insight's less remarkable in a book from the 90's if you consider that Yale prof of literature Harold Bloom published *The Anxiety of Influence" in 1973. "Bloom's central thesis is that poets are hindered in their creative process by the ambiguous relationship they necessarily maintain with precursor poets. While admitting the influence of extraliterary experience on every poet, he argues that "the poet in a poet" is inspired to write by reading another poet's poetry and will tend to produce work that is in danger of being derivative of existing poetry, and, therefore, weak. Because poets historically emphasize an original poetic vision in order to guarantee their survival into posterity, the influence of precursor poets inspires a sense of anxiety in living poets." There's a struggle between the yearning to *become* the admired poet and the horror of losing one's self.
Also, the desire to have and do what the other person is doing seems to me to be just one aspect of the sense of connection small children have with other children. If you show toddlers a video of another toddler crying they will grimace and may cry. Of course later in the day they may be smacking a peer whose toy they covet, and covet precisely because the peer had it. But the desire for the toy the other kid had chosen is also a sort of vote of confidence for the other kid. We are wired to feel a connection with other people. That plays out with all kinds of complications.
I dunno, my overall feeling about this book is that the author had some small but valid insights, which he pumped up in order to make his ideas seem more important. There is such a thing as mimetic tension, but it's not this whole new entity -- it's a problematic phenomena that arises because we naturally connect with other people, but also must maintain our sense of being a unique self. There is such a thing as a myth whose plot revolves around killing the poisonous person who is responsible for society’s problems, but most myths are not about that.
"Certainly things like this have happened. But they don’t seem to me to be the interesting essence of wokeness. If you’re concerned about the influence of wokeness on society, you should be more interested in things like affirmative action laws, anti-free-speech policies, journals refusing to publish politically incorrect scientific results, or colleges forcing students to take diversity classes. All those things get enacted slowly through normal liberal procedures, the opposite of mob violence. Does Girard have anything to say about them?"
All the things you mentioned did not get enacted slowly through normal liberal procedures, they are almost entirely the result of judicial decisions that create incentives for organizations to enact those policies outside of the normal "get democratic validation for this policy" procedure.
I just read Christopher Caldwell's The Age of Entitlement, and he makes a really compelling argument that the reason the issues you mentioned are so controversial and central to current controversies because they were never legislated or voted on.
I had the strange thought that mimetic desire is a lot like the prediction market trope . Or sticking with the guy throwing hot dice in a craps game (until he doesn’t.)
If someone else shows an interest in some thing, is it not natural to think that maybe it’s something you missed? It has resonance in practical terms. We learn by imitation; no one squawks about that. I think, referring to this as desire obfuscates more than clarifies. Humans are very uncomfortable with their own discomfort so projection of one’s discomfort onto an external cause is clearly a thing.
If one were to drag Shakespeare into this, the line that comes to my mind is, “the fault ,dear Brutus, lies not in the stars but in ourselves that we are underlings“
I also couldn’t help thinking of an old prayer/ditty :
“God bless the squire and his relations,
And keep us in our proper stations.”
An accepted hierarchy can be very good for social cohesion.
Memetic tension is too big a thing (like gravity) to attribute to a single voice like Girard's. Accordingly, breaking or easing such tension can follow many trajectories -- not just the conservative gender norms, caste systems, etc. I can think of all sorts of ways the current "single rewards system" you point to could be turned on its head overnight, quite possibly toward greater individuality than ever before.
I’m not Girardian and not really a Christian either but I’m curious, Maybe some of his earlier books make his theory a bit clearer but it is not easy to handle. I find it’s a pity he got so much faith, he would have been possibly considered differently if he wasn’t so Christian, especially in France where the intelligentsia is really anti-christian.
I think I would divide what happens inside a western historically Christian society and the relation with the outside world even if is the same mechanism.
For the case on wokeness and racism. In our society, wokeness defends the victims, ok but racists do not perceive themselves as bullies or a sacrificial mob. They perceive themselves as victims as well. Racists will have arguments such as the invasion of foreigners taking their jobs, etc. So racists make foreigners a scapegoat and act by resentment. Wokeness makes racism a scapegoat and act by resentment. All in a victimization mimetic dynamic.
All sides are taken in loop of “undifferentiation” as Girard’s name it. That’s your stage 2. The war on all against all fuelled by resentment. The crisis can only be resolve by the sacrifice of a scapegoat if we keep in our ancestral violent ways. But our society tends to be less violent because, according to Girard, the infusion of Christ message of non-violence. So we stay stuck in that stage.
On the scapegoat mechanism, I would add our western society does not achieve a crisis resolution using sacrifice because it tends to move from verticality (god, king, country, family, etc.) toward more horizontality (democracy, state, justice, equality, openness, genders, etc.) In verticality, there is always someone higher or outside the community we could name as a scapegoat. In horizontality, nobody is really from the outside, people can be on the fringe or richer but that's possibly marginal compared to previous times. For instance, everyone in a state has access, in theory, to the same justice system preventing individuals to get immediate revenge, etc. So it become really hard to designate a true functioning scapegoat, and that’s not for lack of trying but still the crisis stays unresolved so the violence is deemed to escalade, that’s why Girard in his late work speaks about apocalypse.
The relative inside peace was and still is maintained by persistence in designating enemies/scapegoats on the outskirts of our society, for instance Russians, Muslims, China etc. and they are doing the same on their side. Outside, we make real wars in the name of victims making in our turn thousands of victims. Inside of historically christian society, we use a less powerful violence, a diffused violence, we make victims but the sacrifice is not as strong.
How I understand Girard’s view, there is only two solutions. To truly, faithfully I should say, embrace the victim defence and non-violent way of Christ, so conversion. Or the violence will escalade to extremes, the apocalypse. In his last book in French, he uses Clausewitz theory on war to argument that point. As the means to unchain violence globally have never been so destructive and as the inside divisions keeps getting stronger, if we persist in believing the antichrist disguised in Christ victim’s clothes, we are doomed for apocalypse.
For a capitalistic set of societies where trade is a fundamental fact of life - trade can only happen when there are differentiated needs and wants, and ideally specialization. I'll trade you my apples (which I have lots of and I'm good at growing efficiently) for your oranges (which you have lots of, etc...). If everyone is equally capable of making all things, and is equally looking to obtain exactly the same things, then trade can't happen and we're looking at zero-sum, war or other conflict.
It is insane to compare christianity to wokeism. Christ does not intercede for the victim, but for man. It is the supreme egualitarian regime, and its courtroom is conscience. Individual conscience. All responsability lies with the individual and its soul; not the other. Wokeism, being founded in materialistic marxism, is its opposite: Collective conscience, and all responsability lies with the collective and its power. That is why identitarism is ravaging: it relieves all 'guilty' from the individual and places it on the collective. This is satan: the biological status seeking machine that trumps conscience and rationalizes (the brightest light) all trought relativism. Woke (marxism) is the opposite of Awake (christianity). N1. The Gospel of Luke is written in greek, not hebrew. N2 Satan is 'the divider', not the accuser. The greek root indicates Satyro (half man, half beast) and the diabolo (di = 2, to shoot trought, to divide, as in dialogue (two persons exchange the logos (di.a.logos - wich is the root in greek and latin)). As you see, wokeism 'divides' by 'identity' (what is most false about humans) and christianity 'unites' by inviduality (soul), what is most true about humans.
> come on, the blood of Christian children isn’t even kosher
I was about to say, Christianity has this historical blind spot where slave morality or no, when there's a plague or something else bad on, a common response is to gather a mob and go against the local Jews. Some say it's been getting more intense again since October. As far as I can tell, this has never really solved a problem, unlike in the Oedipus case.
"You still refuse to accept my godhood? Keep your own God! In fact, this might be a good time to pray to him! For I beheld Satan as he fell from Heaven! Like lightning!"
And because of the delivery, I think this quote is spoiled for me forever. :-)
Paraclete isn't ancient Greek for "Holy Spirit". That would be "pneuma to hagion", or other inflections. Literally "wind the holy" (the holy air/wind/breath). This is an absolutely crucial theologically distinction, since the only verses in the New Testament (AFAIK) which imply that the Holy Spirit is a person, other than later insertions, are those which call the paraclete a holy spirit. A paraclete would normally be a person. So whether you accept the Trinity and live, or deny it and are burnt alive, depends on whether you think "the paraclete the air the holy" means the paraclete is a manifestation or recipient of the holy spirit, or "is" the holy spirit.
IMHO the holy spirit is not a person, but in-spiration from God (literally, the holy breath), because that's the only similar concept found in the Old Testament. So I'd get burnt alive.
I think both of Scott's biblical examples of the "single-victim process" don't quite fit upon closer examination.
Note that after the sailors draw lots and identify Jonah as the problem they don't rush to kill him rather they first ask him ask "...what is your business? Where have you come from? What is your country, and of what people are you?” (1:8). After the sailors learn Jonah is feeling from G-d's service they again consult him: “What must we do to you to make the sea calm around us?” (1:11). Jonah tells them this is all his fault and they have to throw him overboard. The sailors do not want to do this and indeed their first response is to try and make it back to land: "Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to regain the shore, but they could not, for the sea was growing more and more stormy about them" (1:13). When the sailors do finally throw Jonah overboard (as he requested) they first cry out to G-d: "...Do not hold us guilty of killing an innocent person! For You, O ETERNAL One, by Your will, have brought this about" (1:14). Of course Jonah then famously does not die. Instead he is released into G-d's custody by way of being swallowed by a large fish. Not only is this not sacrifice but it isn't exile, as Jonah was merely a passenger on a ship filled with presumably pagan strangers. But the more important point is that the mob is totally absent from this story! There is no turning of ire on to Jonah or release of social tension after Jonah is cast into the sea. The sailors are super reluctant. They don't want to kill Jonah and it's Jonah's idea to throw him overboard. The sailors actively see themselves as committing murder and G-d as forcing their hand. If you look through your six step breakdown of the "single-victim process" you'll see very few similarities between any details of the six steps and any details of the Jonah story.
As for Numbers 25, this example is a bit better because there is social tension and it does seem to go away with someone's death. The first important thing to note about this story is that there isn't one sinner but a whole plethora of them, as it says "...the menfolk profaned themselves..." (25:1) and "...Israel attached itself to Baal-peor" (25:3). This pisses G-d off so he tells Moses to gather the heads of the nations and go kill these people publicly. Moses gets some officers together and as he's giving instructions, one of the heads of the nation, the chief of the tribe of Simeon (25:14), grabs a Midianite women and goes to start sinning in front of everyone. This makes everyone start to cry in front of the "Tent of Meeting" except Phinehas who promptly follows the sinner and kills him; "then the plague against the Israelites was checked" (25:8). Is the death of this particular sinner solely responsible for the end of the plague? I think that would be a sloppy reading and much more likely it represents a turning point in the story where the Israelites are emboldened to start killing the sinners among them. The point is, that we know in this case what's causing the plague (lots of people sinning), and G-d gives clear instructions how to proceed (kill the sinners), so it stands to reason that the plague is ended by following G-d's instructions not by the first symbolic action of following G-d's instructions. Further, I would argue that there is once again no mob in this story. G-d gives instructions to kill some people, Moses begins assembling the relevant officers and then we hear about one guy, Phineas, taking action into his own hands (despite the inaction of the masses).
I think much of Scott's broader point about projecting the single-victim process into all pagan myths and denying it's existence in the bible may well be true but I do not think his biblical examples are necessarily the best ones. I should add I have not been able to think of any better biblical examples but would be interested to hear if others have.
The book seems like the 2nd blind wise man describing his part of the elephant to the other two.
My view on woke is far closer to Turchin's "popular immiseration" and "elite overproduction" - particularly the latter. In an era of ever greater concentration of power and wealth in the West, resulting in ever greater diminution of the middle class, there ways are found by which those desiring a position in said shrinking elite can achieve this status - outside of norms.
Cancel culture is perfect for this: taking down of incumbent elites even as it raises the profile of a few "influencers".
Ditto woke overall: where before success was a function of hard work or birth wealth or location etc - now it can be because corporate boards and industry executive populations lack <insert minority here>. If you aren't one of the accepted existing minorities - create yourself one!
Girard is correct about saying that mob mentality is the worst thing ever and society needs a course correction.
The solution is to simply have the solitary individual gun down the angry lynch mob. When NPCs are PUNISHED for behaving like animals, they will quickly learn to stop doing it.
In Francis Fukuyama's recent history of the world, he credits The Catholic Church for 'breaking the ties of kinship' in Western Civilization and thus essentially (paraphrasing wildly) creating the basis for a 'liberal society', one that sees past family, village, and country and essentially sees a global civilization. The universality of human dignity is the big idea of Christianity. The focus on the neighbor, the stranger was a revolutionary idea then, especially to the jews who had considered themselves a chosen people.
The immediate mechanism of maintaining group cohesion in small groups is the process of victimization of the stranger, the outcast, which had its weirdest manifestation in human sacrifice. I am not sure if tying so much to mimesis holds up, It makes more sense to see it as a bad way to maintain group cohesion. It is very weird that human sacrifice was so prevalent in ancient civilizations, and yet, it implies a very deep process that is universal to all of humanity, and in that sense, Girard may be right in pointing to an origin deeper than group cohesion, to the very means by which all humans develop.
Indicative of how widespread it was is the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham did not say, but hey we don't do that anymore!!! Human sacrifice was something that was abhorred by the Jews, the reason the Canaanites were so reviled was because they were Carthaginians, and followed Baal, a famous human sacrifice enjoyer. And yet he was willing to accede until he was stopped.
I think one way to see Girard's philosophy is through, this story of Abraham and Isaac which, set in the Old Testament, prefigures Christ's sacrifice which then vanquishes the whole possibility of human sacrifice.
What other religion has reformed all of humanity like that?
I am completely willing to believe the analysis (esp. since I haven't read the books!); I think I can add something to Gerard's issue.
The ancient Hebrew scapegoat ritual is to benefit the public (taking their sins away), not to punish the goat :). Easter's event is to benefit the public similarly, not to punish Jesus. Even throwing Jonah overboard wasn't because Jonah needed to be punished, but to save the sailors.
Woke actions focus on punishment. I saw this once, pre-woke, "It's not enough to go after rich white people. We need to target wealthy blacks, too." That is, it wasn't focusing on benefiting the poor, but punishing the rich. I think I see this a lot now that "woke" is a term. BLM wasn't interested in helping black crime victims. Trans are favored, but not if they want to detransition. Children in Gaza are worth championing, if their deaths can be blamed on Israelis -- that is, it's about "Israel bad" not "Palestine good."
This does seem more like punishing criminals, but the crime here isn't so much literal, physical crime, or even isms like racism, but success (as a group, not individually). It's well-known that Jews and Chinese experienced significant discrimination, but they often succeeded, so they're not favored. So it feels like sacrifice, not an attempt to justly punish criminals. I've heard this, that a white supremacist is not (just) someone who thinks whites are supreme, but anyone who benefits from white privilege. That includes Abraham Lincoln (who's not popular with that set), JFK, and young children innocent of isms.
One thing the ancient world had lots of was envy. Mostly we don't even think it any more. (If you're more successful than I, why not bust my butt and succeed as well, rather than tearing you down?) Woke feels more like a resurgence of this, because of its emphasis on punishing success rather than ameliorating failure.
I'm late to this comment party, but I have just finished reading the book so I’m going to chip in now in case anyone else is interested.
“It would help if Girard could come up with some specific way that wokeness went too far and became qualitatively different from the Christian imperative.” That’s a good point and Girard’s answer(s) in the book are, as Alexander points out, not terribly clear. I want to posit two better answers (using the premises of the book): (1) wokeness goes too far because it doesn’t see *why* the victim needs to be helped – because it is atheist and (2) wokeness goes too far because it insists on the subject being the victim. The two theories are perhaps connected by their nihilism. I’ll try to explain.
Theory (1). The pagan sacrifice of an innocent victim was terrible, but at least it pointed to divinity: it was a recognition that human desires are not ultimately reconcilable by humans alone; although it was a mistake to think that the temporary reconciliation resulting from a sacrifice demonstrated the divinity of the victim, it was a mistake that pointed to a deeper truth, namely that divinity is required for ultimate human reconciliation.
Woke makes the opposite mistake: it sees that the sacrificial victim is innocent and must be protected; it sees that killing anyone, whether the king or the outcast, is not going to reconcile humanity to itself. But it doesn’t have any alternative mechanism for the reconciliation of human desires. (Christianity provides the solution that our desires are to be mimetic of God’s desires, rather than of our neighbour’s: the Kingdom of God might be described as the state in which all desires are congruent, that only the best is desired for all.) We are still humans – we are still innately rivalrous in our desires – but now all we have are our desires to help the victims, each one of us trying to do so more abjectly or sincerely than our neighbour, but with no end to that rivalry – no resolution – being possible. Wokeness, on this theory, is essentially nihilism which, because it does not provide any ultimate answer to what does bring about human reconciliation, cannot sustain itself. It’s a zombie Christianity.
Theory (2). Assume that wokeness is all about victims: the lower and more despised/oppressed the victim, the better. But *you* are never the victim – there is always someone more victim-y than you. Assume also that sacrifice is still essential to the resolution of conflict and the salvation of the victim: isn’t the natural endpoint of wokeness a kind of self-sacrifice, a suicide by anyone who ranks higher (i.e. is more of an oppressor)? Pagan morality says that you must turn on the weak and sacrifice (e.g.) the beggar (as in the Apollonius of Tyana example); wokeness says you must turn on the strong and therefore sacrifice yourself; only Christianity says that no more sacrifice is required?
This was my thought, too. Maybe the mob either turns on the alpha or the omega. One skill that helps you stay in power as an alpha is the ability to redirect the mob - always give them a scapegoat.
So, uh, I guess I get to be the first to point out that in the title you've put "Lighting" instead of "Lightning"...
Man, I screwed this one up so badly. Most of the problems involved bugs going back and forth between two Substack editors, but the "lighting" one is totally on me.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/678214025112026954/
I'll add the picayune point that the URL says "I saw ..." but the book title is "I see ..."
The Gospel quotation is "I saw" but Girard seems to have shifted it to "I see", for what reasons I don't know.
Girard presumably wrote in French - is it possible that somewhere in the translation from Greek to English, or Greek to French to English, there was a tense ambiguity or a tense change?
I wondered about that, but the original title does indeed seem to be "I See", not "I Saw":
https://www.grasset.fr/livre/je-vois-satan-tomber-comme-leclair-9782246267911/
Je vois Satan tomber comme l'éclair
René Girard
Do you happen to know what the standard French translation of the Gospel of Luke says? (Most people wouldn't, but you seem like someone who might, or who might be interested enough to look it up!)
Greek and French are the only foreign languages I speak (badly), and neither has very tense structure that doesn't map easily onto the English one. Though of course it's possible that it's stylish in French or Greek to use present tense in a situation that calls for past or vice versa.
Typo: "not in the of anti-Christian" should be "not in the sense of anti-Christian"
Love it - I imagined the lighting rig come crashing down as the climax of an Iron Maiden concert in Tel Aviv, wreaking death and destruction, as the band played on '666 the number of the beast' etc...
That's roughly how the game Brutal Legend starts.
I believe you mean "Brütal Legend" :-)
CURSE YOU, UMLAUT!
I actually think a good complement to this piece is this contrapoints video on envy: https://youtu.be/aPhrTOg1RUk?si=G_byH4Qksy43fzWf
idk if I've pitched this to you before or not, but I think you might be interested in this other Substack post ( https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/are-we-in-a-500-year-religious-revolution?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2 ) which covers The Great Emergence by Phyllis Tickle.
Basically, the claim is that Christianity has gone thru ~500-year cycles as the basic story breaks down, and then is reforged according to contemporary sensibilities, and that social justice / wokeness is the 5th such cycle. Importantly, the change each time has involved the movement of authority--the last cycles moving from the institutional authority of the pope to the individual conscience / interpretation of the Bible and now to egalitarian crowdsourcing. (Which is code for 'mob rule' and seems pretty bad from where I sit.)
Yes, all of that reads like common sense by now. A new source of justified institutional authority doesn't appear to be immediately forthcoming, so the mob rule is going to have to burn itself out, the extent of collateral damage remaining to be seen. Unless of course we manage to build the artificial savior/destroyer sooner.
If by "wokeness" you actually mean the largely-online collection of buzzwords and cultural practices of the last decade, this claim absolutely takes the cake for the most extreme lack of historical perspective I have *ever* seen.
Seriously? Once-in-500-year religious upheavals include the Crusades, the Reformation and...wokeness? This is almost literally equivalent to saying American history has had three great conflicts: the revolution, the civil war, and the arguments over Hillary Clinton's emails. It takes lack of perspective to a level far beyond parody. Can we *at least* wait until wokeness has been around for a full century, has had several major wars fought over it, and has become a foundational part of many countries' political systems, before declaring it the new reformation?
If by wokeness you mean something more like "the entire concept of social progressivism" this claim would sound reasonable, but it doesn't seem like that's what's meant.
Truly. The number of times I see wokeness characterized as the 5th horseman of the apocalypse— especially in SSC comments— is staggering and puzzling.
People commenting on a blog are probably very online. In real life, it’s apparently a thing somewhere but I’ve never encountered it.
It's pretty staggering, but I don't think it's exactly puzzling. I think that a lot of Scott's readership consists of people who started out left wing, and see wokeness as the thing that alienated them from their own political faction.
Something similar happened in the sixties, as the revolutionary youth came into conflict with the older labor movement progressives.
What do you mean? Was there an equivalent sense of twice-in-a-millenium significance of that time period? I don’t know much about progressivism in the 60s
I mean that the revolutionary youth of the day felt that they needed to reject what we would now call the "Establishment Left" (the labor unions and such) almost as much as the "Establishment Right." That's whay they called themselves "The New Left" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left).
I'd argue that we're nearing the end of the 4th era. What we have right now is just the end result of moralism, which started about 400 years ago. Given current technological developments, there might not even be a 5th era...
> Once-in-500-year religious upheavals
No, I think I summarized it incorrectly. They see it more as "250 years of the thing breaking apart and 250 years of the new thing solidifying", tho my view is that the jumps are more discrete.
> If by wokeness you mean something more like "the entire concept of social progressivism" this claim would sound reasonable, but it doesn't seem like that's what's meant.
I don't have a great label for pointing at the thing that seems most relevant to me. I would call it something like "popularist moralism". That is, "popularist" means that rather than coming from the logical extrapolations of a set of axioms or a particular person or institution, it's coming from "what seems right to right-thinking people", which is a much more dynamic and fluid object. "Moralism" means that it views itself as having moral force and being about going from ought to is. I think that "wokeness" construed broadly describes that, and construed narrowly is much less.
Two hundred years ago, abolitionists were primarily motivated by Protestantism. What are the abolitionists of today primarily motivated by?
I would argue that what you are describing is always the basis of popular morality. I am not convinced that most ordinary people habitually put much more thought into it than that.
200 years ago, slavery was motivated by seeming right (and axiomatically ordained by the Bible) to right thinking (Christian) people. Ask any Englishman in 1899 if the Hindoo had any right thinking beliefs worthy of contemplation. Calling popularist moralism a new widespread phenomenon feels too convenient
On the slavery point, I agree there were both pro-slavery and anti-slavery Christians in 1823. The thing that seems astonishing to me is the absence of anti-slavery non-Christians at that point and earlier. (Lots of people thought "we don't want to be slaves" but the idea of not having slaves anywhere seems to be rare.)
I think there were a bunch of Indophile Englishmen in 1899, so I'm not sure what you mean by your second sentence. Besides that, I don't think the English sense of the superiority of English thought rested on "lots of people think this" rather than something more like "it's logical"; the thing that's important is the movement of _how and why_ people justify their beliefs.
I think one has to understand that slavery in some form had been near universal since the beginning of civilization. No doubt preindustrial people found it hard to even imagine such a radical departure from what they knew.
As for the English thing, popular culture in the late 1800's held that different ethnicities differed in terms of their inherited potential. It was qualtiy of the blood of their ancestors that ensured the supposed superiority of their society.
Slavery had been near universal since the beginning of civilization, but Western civilization's turn away from that nigh-universality started more like 400 years ago and "Slavery Bad!" was probably the dominant position by 1823.
Which is not to say that mainstream Western civilization 200 years ago was racially egalitarian or anything like that. You can believe someone to be inferior while still believing it would be wrong to enslave them.
"Mob rule" these days is like capitalism and democracy - the worst system ever except for all of the others we've tried.
That might be true, but all the liberal reforms from 60s-70s led directly to the abuse crisis or simply the emptying of the churches, or both. What is not said, is that the more liberal diocese had the biggest abuse problems, all those guitar masses attracted assholes. What you are seeing now in the Vatican is the dying gasp of some old hippies.
The younger generation of priests is so much better, they were mostly homeschooled. This is why the argentinian is so afraid.
“Nietzsche proposed that we stop all of this, return to square one, and re-adopt a “master morality” that idolizes the powerful.”
Not sure if you’re quoting Girard here, but this is incorrect and a common misconception about Nietzsche. His idea of the Übermensch transcends both master and slave morality, and while he does “prefer” masters to slaves, he doesn’t really like either.
Then I think I genuinely don't understand this. The Ubermensch is powerful, strong-willed, martial, beautiful, and all the other things that master morality says are good. How is siding with the Ubermensch not siding with master morality?
They are entirely different concepts and I can’t explain it in detail in a Substack comment. The Ubermensch is a creator of new life-affirming values, not just an ultra powerful Machiavellian figure. This is a mass media trope that has little to do with his real philosophy.
Nietzsche prefers the masters but also praises slave morality for adding inwardness and debt to the human soul.
Depth, not debt
Thanks, I've slightly edited the piece and will try to look into this more.
No problem, and I recommend reading The Genealogy of Morality for more on this
GoM has more about master and slave morality, while Thus Spoke Zarathustra is more about the Übermensch
It's been years since I read any Nietzsche too, but IIRC I got something pretty close to what you did out of it; I think — as I understood it — the main difference between master and Übermensch is that someone operating by the former morality is still trapped by the values given to him, whereas the latter creates his own (which obviously takes strength of will, power, etc. to do — but not popularity, necessarily*).
But I've undoubtedly forgotten or missed some subtlety only a true Mitteleuropäer could understand.
--------------------------
* what's the significance of this aside? I don't know but I'm leaving it in in case it becomes useful or seems smart
Morality is really just a fancy name for "prevailing ideas on what is proper and beneficial to society". There is no such thing as absolute morality, even if in practice some moral values are esteemed by nearly every society.
So someone who "creates their own" morality seems almost a contradiction in terms, unless it just means "ploughs their own furrow, indifferent to anyone else's approval or otherwise". That doesn't necessarily take strength of will or power. For example, as far as I can see, a hobo swilling cider on a park bench all day and sleeping in a hedge each night satisfies the condition.
Does anyone know if Nietzsche considered Jesus to be an Übermensch in any way? Because he seems to fulfill the criteria.
Diogenes might qualify.
With respect to those who know much much more about Nietzsche than I do, are the two concepts really *that* distinct? I admit I haven't read GoM or TSZ, but the arguments I've seen by Nietzsche fans that they are distinct usually seem pretty strained to me, and much more complex and subtle than they would be if the distinction were really that basic and incontrovertible. Could one say that there was supposed to be a distinction, but N. himself didn't always have it clear in his head? I have this memory that, as historical examples of the Ubermensch, N. suggested Caesar and Napoleon. Could one at least say that, even if the common conception of Ubermensch misconstrues Nietzsche, N. himself is partly responsible?
Yes, they are entirely different things. Master/slave morality is a description of a type of human psychology that has played out over millennia. The Übermensch is a hypothetical figure for the present/future that is a creator of values.
Nietzsche does not use Napoleon or Caesar as examples of the Übermensch, he uses them as examples of "free spirits" or admirable figures. Übermensch translates as "over man" and is intended to be the figure transcending the "death of God" and modernity's nihilism crisis.
This distinction is not really that difficult or unclear and anyone familiar with Nietzsche will tell you the exact same thing. The only people with issues understanding this are those that haven't seem to actually read his books or any secondary literature on the topic. Which is odd to me why they insist on commenting about something they haven't read, but alas...
So does Nietzsche not, in fact, admire and praise master morality, and at a certain length, even if it's not the same as Ubermenschheit?
And, with respect, I don't think you should so dismiss people who have "issues with understanding this." Some of us are genuinely curious, but we're not prepared to just throw in a "Yes, Socrates, that's certainly true" and be done with it. Voicing authority is not the same as intellectual exchange.
Yes as I said in the original comment, Nietzsche prefers master morality to slave morality, but is still critical of it and doesn't want to return the world to a master morality system – nor does he think such a thing would even be possible in our modern era, as we have undergone nearly 2,000 years of Christian history. This is all covered quite well in Nietzsche's books and essays.
You'll have to excuse my dismissive response and I hope it doesn't come off as being too rude, but nothing I've written here is anything other than basic knowledge about the man's philosophy that any reasonably intelligent person could pick up from reading his Wikipedia page and a book or two.
He's been dead for 123 years and there are numerous free resources online to learn about his ideas. His books and their translations are in the public domain. So try to understand why it can be frustrating to people that have done their (very easy) homework when others can't bother to do the slightest bit of research on their own and instead insist, "either you explain this complex philosophy to me in the comment section here or it's obviously a stupid idea that I can rightly dismiss."
Did he say when the Ubermensch is coming?
Not for many generations:
>Could ye CREATE a God?--Then, I pray you, be silent about all Gods! But
ye could well create the Superman.
>
>Not perhaps ye yourselves, my brethren! But into fathers and forefathers
of the Superman could ye transform yourselves: and let that be your best
creating!--
But my personal interpretation is that the ubermensch is literally post-human, and is better translated as the humorous "post man" or the unfortunately already taken "trans man", so it may take as long as it took humans to arrive from apes (although perhaps not, since we have the unique ability to transcend what is animal in us, which would include gene therapy and directed breeding):
>All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and ye
want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the
beast than surpass man?
>
>What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the
same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame.
>
>Ye have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still
worm. Once were ye apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than any of
the apes.
The Übermensch idea is popular in common discourse about Nietzsche, but honestly it does not play that much of a role in his philosophy. The Übermensch is a big deal in Zarathustra, but barely mentioned elsewhere. Kasimir's comments here are basically right. But don't feel badly if you find Nietzsche to be unclear. He comments (tongue-in-cheek) in Beyond Good and Evil (sec 27) that he obviously tries to do everything he can to make himself hard to understand!
My main takeaway from reading Nietzsche was to distrust anyone providing a quote from any of his works as proof that this is what Nietzsche thought.
It kind of sounds like the synthesis of master and slave, in a Hegelian dialectic sense.
If you need one more "+1, Kiefer has a good take" consider this is. I'm no philosopher, but I did read a lot of Nietzsche very carefully, and my take was that Ubermensch construct was not what most people think it is.
To put more historical perspective on why it is, Nietzsche's sister (? some female relative) after his death took one or several of his works, added a "this proves Nazis are right" interpretations, and took it to the Nazi propaganda machine, which agreed.
So pretty much now most of society is unwittingly just reciting bad Nazi propaganda when they talk about Nietzsche.
Pretty hilarious, when you think about it.
I think the Ubermensch is too independent to want slaves, if that's to the point.
I continue to pray that the rationalist community will pick up some Nietzsche and humbly admit that their Wikipedia level knowledge of his work is a massive philosophical blindspot. It renders most of the writing about religion and morality in the Rat community totally embarrassing. Like poorly read grad students they arrive at hazy, half-baked versions of the ideas Nietzsche put down 100 years ago. The sequence of books from Beyond Good and Evil to Ecce Homo aren't even difficult.
Yes, well that’s one reason why no one in the actual philosophy community takes the Rationalist community very seriously...
Well, the rationalist community doesn't take them seriously because they'd rather die than write clearly and comprehensibly. To be fair, Nietzsche is an exception for the most part.
I think you are the first person in history - certainly the first I've seen - to describe Nietzsche's writing as clear and comprehensible.
Ironically, his best known book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is about the least clear and comprehensible.
Ah, that's the only one I've tried to read.
Genealogy of Morals is a very clearly written book, and if one finds it incomprehensible it's probably because of how deeply the ideas it undermines are ingrained in one's worldview.
His writing is very clear and comprehensible. He mostly wrote aphorisms and essays. It's much, much easier to understand than say, Hegel or Deleuze.
"Easier than Hegel" is faint praise...
I think it's a bit much to say that "no one in the actual philosophy community takes the Rationalist community very seriously". I like to think I'm someone in the "actual philosophy community" (I've been tenured in philosophy departments at three different universities, and have published papers in many highly-regarded journals) and I take the Rationality community fairly seriously (much of my recent work has been engaging with the various decision theories that emerged from the Rationalist community that recommend one-boxing in classic Newcomb cases, but not "medical Newcomb" cases).
There's obviously a lot of people here who qualify as dilettantes, at best - but that's what you get from a public internet forum. It's still a philosophically interesting community that has interesting and novel ideas that deserve to be written up in philosophically-comprehensible forms, even if I think that a lot of it is wrong or misguided (though probably less so than a large number of ideas that have currency in the actual philosophy community.
Usually I would ban you for the offense of "saying people are incredibly stupid and should be ashamed of themselves but not giving any arguments or suggesting what in particular they need to correct", but I am interested enough in this that I will give you a chance to tell me the arguments, if you could possibly condescend to doing so.
I've read about 4-5 Nietzsche books but it was a *long* time ago and I may have forgotten some things, please have patience with me.
>Usually I would ban you for the offense of "saying people are incredibly stupid and should be ashamed of themselves but not giving any arguments or suggesting what in particular they need to correct"
Well, I don't know. I feel like the quoted sentiment is sometimes...well, not appropriate, exactly, but certainly understandable. I can easily picture a rationalist, who for the hundredth time is reading one of those asinine critiques of 'rationalism' that completely miss the point, and has no patience for anything other than "you have no idea what you're talking about, go read the Sequences".
The bannable part of that post is the way it unreasonably singles out rationalists, as they don't particularly stand out among the many, many laypeople who (presumably) have a very distorted understanding of Nietzsche due to the way popular culture portrays him.
Understandable, sure. Even wanting to punch someone is understandable in certain situations, and yet it might get you banned from some places. ;)
I'm also curious what Whimsi will suggest here, but their claim that "the sequence of books from BGE to EH aren't even difficult" is just plain false. Nietzsche was a seductive trickster figure (in Liam Kofi Bright's taxonomy, a "sexy murder poet") whose writings deliberately invited misinterpretation.
Half-baked interpretations of Nietzsche are hardly the exclusive domain of "the rationalist community."
"In the mountains, the quickest way to travel is from peak to peak. But for that one must have long legs."
Well, thanks for not banning me. I didn’t mean to imply anyone was stupid, only that they have neglected a very specific body of important work. Someone rightfully pointed out below that it’s frustrating to see someone come out with some bold anti-Rat post, when it’s entirely clear they haven’t even attempted to read the sequences. This is a similar situation.
I’m being entirely sincere, and of course I do not believe that rationalists are particularly egregious in misinterpreting Nietzsche. My inflammatory tone is the result of frustration from an extremely impressive community failing to even address the writer who is essentially the basis of all meta-analyses of morals, and their development from pre-antiquity. He is why we in the west can turn a lens on our lenses (which is why he’s not really a figure of the right, but much more the father of Deleuze, Foucault, etc. than Hitler).
I know that’s extremely general, but it sort of has to be, unless I’m going to put together an essay. Nietzsche demands the ‘read the sequences’ treatment—his work is so varied and concise that he can only be meaningfully summarized with extreme effort and specific application of one idea or fragment at a time. His books are literally collections of hundreds of interconnected ‘blog posts’ of 100-5,000 words in length, written with intentional disregard for overriding theses or ‘points’ that they are trying to prove in totality.
I refuse to say Nietzsche is ‘difficult’ because he is always presenting his criticisms (and 90% of his work is made up of polemics and criticisms of concepts/people which came before) in the most concise form possible. People say he is difficult because it’s almost impossible to divine a coherent ideology from such an immense collection of polemics—which is precisely what he says he wanted! He always describes himself as a transitional figure, a wily critic who only occasionally dares to venture an ‘ought’.
In the fewest words possible: Nietzsche is the premier historian of conceptual formation and drift within western culture: his work attempts to scrutinize how the western map of the moral world came to be in pre-history, as well as how it has changed as a result of mimetic spread across cultures, and within individual minds. However before everything else, he was a prodigal philologist, and that may be the most important thing about him.
I do not believe Rationalists, nor any other philosophical movement can understand their place in the collective moral/psychic development of humanity without having read that development’s chief historian and critic.
The recurring problem with not having a coherent worldview and being exclusively polemic is that you can arbitrarily raise your standard for what is acceptable, or even have inconsistent standards for what is acceptable, if 2+2 =4 is bad because it's true and also 2+2!=4 is also bad because it's false, that is wholly uninteresting except for the volume of negative valence words you can attach to either.
Not that I can say that Nietzsche has this problem, but keeping this important background point in mind for responses is necessary for people to make sense of a philosopher. For an COMPLETELY ignorant example, if the ubermensch is distinct from the master and the slave, 1. Why doesn't the master slave dichotomy just cover the entire space of human experience 2. If it doesn't represent human experience, in what circumstances can I consider this useful rather than throwing up my hands and saying "everyone is a bit of master and a bit of slave" 3. Considering the above, how is the ubermensch distinct?
I don't think any of the above points are an actual stance anyone has, or contains any type of crux, but if I do become dissatisfied with any philosophical stance, that's the context I would need to be satisfied beyond explaining what was written.
Following up on this thread in hopes it may result in a 5% chance of Scott reading Beyond Good and Evil, Genealogy of Morals, and Ecce Homo (but hopefully skipping Zarathustra) and writing a long post that brings N into the light for Rationalists.
This is a great comment in and of itself, and certainly one Nietzsche would agree with. However implicit in it is a misunderstanding of the illustrative examples (which you say, and seem to expect). The reason Nietzsche isn’t dissatisfying in this way is because he isn’t slapping the SM dichotomy on human experience and calling it a day. As I said before, Nietzsche is far more accurately described as a historian of collective development rather than a philosopher in the same sense as the major figures he’s usually associated with.
In this case, he’s interested in the way the human animal’s physical and mental make up informs it’s cultural and individual development into a being that must form moral priors and act. What he provides is a detailed account of this history and it’s antecedents, taking special interest in the actual moment to moment processes within a mind when it is, say, humiliated in the face of betters, or presented with an insoluble problem. He then takes those base psychological facts and extrapolates and interpolates them from and into western history.
Allegory: One alien biologist might find a human hand bone and spend his career in confirming his initial observation that this body part would have been best used for clutching things.
Imagine another finds the same bone and instead goes into the fossil record and determines that it must have evolved from a fish’s flipper, and thus likely has some vestigial parts, and is far from efficient, and must then be a transitional tool for the animal in the same way as the flipper was, and might indeed be just one small part of a larger mechanism that in totality did not clutch or grab anything at all.
The second biologist is only an uninteresting, content-free polemicist in so far as he refuses to abandon his skepticism in the face of questions he doesn’t yet have information enough to understand, let alone answer. The master-slave dichotomy is just one extremely short hand way of summarizing ONE manner in which humans organize themselves morally in correspondence with the landscape of reality, like different balls randomly scattered across a topographic map.
Here is a brief example of Nietzsche’s ‘diagnostic’ style, taking into account that this is one tiny paragraph that builds towards a broader look at the origins of Christian Morality:
As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies - but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred. The truly great haters in the world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness.
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). Essay 1, Section 7
Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil are reasonable recommendations, but I would recommend Gay Science instead of Ecce Homo. In fact, I would say if you are going to read just one book by Nietzsche to decide whether you want to read others, Gay Science is the best choice.
Ecce Homo is a terrible choice for a short Nietzsche reading list, especially if the list is intended for someone who is not initially sympathetic to Nietzsche. (I read it as a teenager and quickly came to the conclusion that Nietzsche was an idiot not worth wasting my time on.) It would maybe be good to read as one's seventh or eighth Nietzsche book, after GS, GM, BGE, TI, BT, Z, and perhaps D or UM.
I've read most of Nietzsche, and frankly if right and left have any meaning at all, he is a figure of the right.
Replying here because I agree with Whimsi that better familiarity with Nietzsche in these parts could be good, with a big caveat (see below). I also don't think Whimsi or Kiefer are doing an adequate job of addressing a few of the great misconceptions coming up here, e.g. about master and slave moralities, partly because they insist that doing so would take an essay, and that reading the books for yourself is easy.
I think they're dead wrong on the books point: understanding the books is not easy. I don't claim to understand them adequately, and I don't expect that to change by the end of my life. I'm not at all saying understanding N is impossible, just that it's not a thing that can be done with some casual reading, like understanding what Scott thinks about the Ketamine Placebo Effect can be. Some of this is because the material is just difficult, some of this is because Nietzsche's thought isn't presented in, and probably doesn't have, a *system*, and some of this is because Nietzsche invites misunderstanding and creative, potentially fruitful interpretation and misinterpretation.
That leads me to the BIG CAVEAT: Nietzsche's thought is dangerous insofar as it combines incisive and delightful polemics against moral and theoretical opinions that maintain civilized society with hazy prescriptions or programs that, seemingly by design, one could read many terrible things into. If I had a teenage son, I certainly wouldn't tell him to just go off and read Nietzsche by himself, just like I wouldn't tell him to go off and read Dabiq by himself. Casually reading Nietzsche, without seriously questioning him or being around people who will seriously question him can lead to acquiring shallow, morally corrosive opinions (e.g. lazily accepting some shallow version of Nietzschean relativism) and it can also lead to worse things. I'm not being a fuddy duddy; Nietzsche's dangerous. And it's not just my opinion: he said it first.
Anyways, here are a few points that address confusions here, that I think are more or less accurate, and that I hope make Nietzsche seem worth considering as a powerful and challenging source of thought on political-moral questions.
1. Yes, master morality and the idea of the ubermensch are different things.
- First, to clear up some basic confusions about what master and slave morality are, master morality is a moral system (using that term loosely) created by a people that takes itself as the starting point for what is good, and secondarily develops the idea of what is bad as what is not like itself. Slave morality is a moral system created by a people that takes the qualities of an oppressive people or force as the starting point for what is evil, and secondarily develops the idea of what is good as what is being oppressed, or does not oppress, is harmless, and things like that. Slave moralities do not have to remain, as they develop and spread, "servile" in a crude sense. The specific difference is this difference of what moral system focuses or centers itself on. I don't think that N says there can't be mixing, in that a people's moral system could be like one of these types in one realm and like another type in another realm. People and peoples are complicated, and I don't think N claims everything is either one or the other, plan and simple.
- Yes, N thinks that master morality is healthier than slave morality, but he doesn't think a return to master morality is possible or desirable. My rough account of the main reason for this is that N thinks the "masters" of yore had limited powers of self-awareness and introspection, and that the "slave revolt" in morality introduced these things as well as the rich, sometimes painful, sometimes exhilarating and elevating moral experiences of guilt, conscience, devotion, and the desire to overcome our psychological failings and limitations. These things are both here to stay (but that doesn't mean they can't be reshaped and reinterpreted) and genuine developments. Why are they developments? Because they open up a new field of play for the human will to power. The will to power is what makes humans tick. Rich interior life, for lack of a better phrase, is a new place for the human will to exert itself, in projects of self understanding and self mastery. Humanity is deeper, more interesting, greater (in potential) because of the "slave revolt" in morality.
Side note--correct me if I'm wrong, but IIRC, N maintains in several places that philosophy is a post-slave revolt phenomenon, and is something like the highest, most spiritual expression of the will to power. So that's another, somewhat concrete, way that N thinks that humanity after the slave revolt in morality is better, even if "sick" in new ways.
- How does the ubermensch fit in? Very roughly (take this with a grain of salt), the ubermensch is the idea of a future human being (or, more likely, human beings) who, finding themselves in this liminal historical period following the death of God (read "decay and collapse of metaphysical opinions that previously grounded opinions about morality and humanity's place in the world"), will create new opinions about humanity's place in the world and how humans should live. They will do so with the understanding that these new opinions cannot be grounded as they have been historically in metaphysical opinions, or, to say the same thing, that our place in the world and how we should live is not something that is given to us by a fixed external reality, but is creatively interpreted, willed, even "attempted" and "tested." Crucially, the ubermenschen themselves, as well as the inhabitants of their new worlds, will all have been deepened by the historical "slave revolt" and know about the psychological and moral landscape that revolt opened up for humanity. They will not, like the "masters" of yore, just assert that what is like them is good, most of all because 1) they will know that their assertion is grounded only in their will, not in reality and 2) because they will not be complacent with their own example of humanity, but will be striving to create something better than themselves, more powerful, yes, but also more sensitive, more subtle, more alive to the heights of human being that the slave revolt has revealed (see above example of philosophy)
2. Something helpful to me, in trying to get a grip on N's thought, is the following rough comparison between him and the Greeks (meaning here Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle). The Greeks roughly agree that philosophy is the greatest human activity, or that the highest human longing is to understand the nature of our world and ourselves (so, pursuing questions like "what is justice," and "are there fixed natures, or is our world determined by divine will or something else incomprehensible," and in general trying to understand natural necessities, assuming they exist). They are able to maintain this position in part because they think that there indeed are fixed natures, and that the human mind can make contact with them. Nietzsche does not seem to think that philosophy is the highest human life. The obvious example here is the ubermensch, which is a human type that has some "philosophical" characteristics but is certainly not a philosopher in any straightforward sense and seems, in N's thought, to be a higher expression of human life. This is probably in part because Nietzsche, although certainly not a theist, does not think there is stable, intelligible nature. Instead of perceiving or receiving the external world, the human mind is always "willing" it into some shape or other. What is called philosophy is hence just a very subtle, very ambitious expression of the will to power, not the pursuit of understanding. Since we are "willing" the world around us, there is great variety in the different worlds (i.e. subjective experiences of the world) that exist. In this situation where philosophy in the classical sense is impossible and there is no knowable external world, the closest analog to understanding the external world is to have your unique, created model of the world (but again, no territory, just a map that you have willed) be the model of the world that everyone else, as much as possible, wills for themselves. Thus, philosophy, once understood for what it actually is, points beyond itself to the ubermensch, to creating and imposing new visions of humanity and the world on everyone else, to radical, potentially very dangerous political and legislative projects.
(An interesting question here is whether I've got the causality right: is it the impossibility of philosophy as classically understood that leads N to the idea of the will to power as the fundamental human force and thence to things like the idea of the ubermensch, or is it the idea of the will to power that leads to the impossibility of philosophy etc.?)
If someone actually wrote a post about Nietzsche and connected the ideas to various things in the Sequences, and/or tried to argue that the Nietzsche version is better in various ways then it would probably get good uptake.
I am fond of Adorno's take on this issue:
"The slave morality is indeed bad: it is still the master morality."
Presumably your version of Nietzsche would agree?
I haven’t read much of Adorno so you’re gonna have to expand a little more on that. Nietzsche definitely didn’t think they were the same thing.
Adorno was all about dialectic, so the idea underlying that laconic statement is that a crude slave morality (e.g. "wokeness") was that it merely offers the antithesis of the master morality. It leaves the fundamental structural relationships in place and merely inverts the value judgments. It is not "the same thing" as the master morality in that it offers different value judgments, but it is "still the master morality" (immer noch Herrenmoral) in that it presupposes the master morality rather than transcends it. This is why slave morality cannot be the final morality, and why it doesn't yield the possibility of true emancipation, which requires a form of thought that transcends both slave and master morality.
On my reading, Adorno and Nietzsche are roughly in agreement up to here, and would also agree that we cannot transcend the master and slave moralities by merely seeking a compromise that keeps the best parts of each (i.e. the sort of crude solution an Aristotelian or an Englishman might propose). I think they would also agree that the problem is one whose solution lies in the future: neither Adorno nor Nietzsche thinks they have it all figured out already.
The divergence between Nietzsche and Adorno comes at the stage of imagining what form a solution might take. Nietzsche imagines a solution in the form of an individual psychology: the Ubermensch is the one who has solved the problem and whose actions are guided by neither the master or the slave morality, but by his own freely chosen values. Adorno, by contrast, imagines a solution taking the shape of a dialectical consciousness manifested in concrete forms of social life.
This is where Adorno gets a bit too Hegelian for me to be confident in my interpretation, but I think he is pointing towards the idea that the master and slave moralities are not fundamentally psychological phenomena, but "social facts." (Adorno's only explicit engagement with Durkheim was in the form of a fierce attack, but the Durkheimian phrase here offers a convenient label for a conceptual tool that Adorno, Marx and arguably even Hegel, all shared with that Frenchman.) Their psychological form is only the surface manifestation of a logic of social relations, so they cannot be transcended at the individual level just by thinking about things differently. Moving beyond them necessarily involves social transformation as well as individual psychological change.
So, Inverting the Stupidity in rationalese...I'll get my coat.
Thanks for the comment. I agree that your first part is basically just what Nietzsche says, so I'm not sure Adorno has much novel thought to offer there.
"Nietzsche imagines a solution in the form of an individual psychology: the Ubermensch is the one who has solved the problem and whose actions are guided by neither the master or the slave morality, but by his own freely chosen values. "
There are a few scholars that question this individualist approach of Nietzsche and if you're interested in the topic, I recommend them. Specifically "Nietzsche's Philosophy of Religion" by Julian Young is very much an attempt to show how N's ideas were socially-minded, not just individually-minded.
I don't think Adorno was trying to say something "novel" with that line - it was just an aphorism that neatly summarizes why neither master morality nor slave morality solve the problems inherent in the other.
Young's claim that Nietzsche was a communitarian thinker gets a raised eyebrow from me, but I haven't looked into them in any detail. Maybe I will take a look when I get the chance.
I think my major problem with Nietzsche, besides the obvious, os that he is writing about the servility of Christianity at a time when Christianity dominated the world almost entirely. Japan being the only major exception I can think of.
If a particular ideology is world dominant and its adherents are the masters then calling that ideology servile lacks credibility.
Slave morality is not about being servile. I don’t think you’re familiar enough with the concept.
I’m not. And I don’t really care to be because it looks like junk.
There’s a slave morality, there’s Übermensch and unterMensch but it’s not what you think, he was actually a hippy and loved people, particularly fond of children.
( The answer for perhaps for Nietzsche is to write more clearly. Use your words mate.)
Rather than direct us to the book we need to read to understand the guru’s words (which is something that any believer in astrology, or phrenology, or any other ideology could do) it’s surely incumbent on the purveyors of the philosophy to explain themselves, not to hand-wave away by saying the average guy “just doesn’t understand this”.
So what does Nietzsche want. What is his ideal society?
Nietzsche is concerned with nihilism; his argument is that the moral standards of European society (compassion for the oppressed) have become detached from their grounding because they are dependent on a Christianity that is no longer authoritative (God is dead is not a statement about how Christianity is false but rather that it is no longer sufficient as the foundation for political and social action). This threatens Western society with a complete collapse into meaninglessness unless there arises the creation of a new value system, the transvaluation of values; the ubermensch is he who is powerful enough in the broadest sense to be a self-creator and propagator of those new values.
Please never talk about Nietzsche again until you have actually read anything important he’s written
You do you Arnold.
Banned for this comment.
>I think my major problem with Nietzsche, besides the obvious, os that he is writing about the servility of Christianity at a time when Christianity dominated the world almost entirely.
>I’m not. And I don’t really care to be because it looks like junk.
Can you see the major problem of having a major problem with someone's ideas while simultaneously saying that you don't care to familiarize yourself with them?
>So what does Nietzsche want. What is his ideal society?
He didn't strike me as thinking in Socratic terms, ie the ideal form of some thing. From what I've read, Nietzsche was more specific when it came to diagnosing what he saw as the problem than when it came to the details of what he wants to come next (similar in this respect to Marx?). I don't think he had an ideal outcome (ideal society) in mind, but rather focused on the input (the system of values).
“ Can you see the major problem of having a major problem with someone's ideas while simultaneously saying that you don't care to familiarize yourself with them?”
I don’t believe I have to read a book on transubstantiation to resist the idea of transubstantiation. Or the best book on astrology to resist the influence of the stars.
I have read some of Nietzsche and it runs from being gibberish to being obviously wrong.
The fact that neither Marx nor Nietzsche propose solutions is part of the problem of both of their philosophies - they are unfalsifiable
Your strained analogy doesn't make any better your doubling down on not caring to understand something while simultaneously asserting that it's "obviously wrong". Rather it just paints you as someone incapable of thinking outside the bounds of WEIRD thinking and assumptions.
I don't see how one can claim that Marx didn't propose a solution. Workers of the world, unite! Post-capitalist utopia. Etc. (Wrong solution, of course, at least on any reasonable time scale.)
Yet then, in the 20th century, Christianity kind of voluntarily gave up world domination. Voluntarily giving up domination seems pretty unusual in history. Perhaps one could score that as an impressive sort-of-prediction by Nietzsche? (I‘m not familiar with his philosophy, though.)
It also became less Christian. In any case I’m not going to credit Nietzsche as a time traveller or fortune teller, he was writing about the era he was in.
I was coming here to say the same thing. In Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche says that the bad conscience (guilt, the result of Christian/slave morality) is an illness, but as pregnancy is an illness. After 2000 years of Christianity we can't go back to the morality of the "old masters"--we have to forge new kinds of morality, each of us finding our own categorical imperative (as he says in The Antichrist). Old master morality was about dominating others ("blonde beasts of prey"), but the morality of the Übermenschen will be about self-dominance, self-control, and self-creation. The interesting thing that Christianity did for human psychology is that it turned dominance instincts inwards; that is the consequence of ascetic values.
Quite a Nietzsche-thread you generated by your comment Kiefer.
But is not this whole quarrel about “what Nietzsche actually meant by what he wrote” misplaced. The thing is, Nietzsche is dead. We cannot ask him for clarifications if we disagree about how to interpret his texts. All we have are the texts. And any text can be interpreted in different ways.
That said, this does not mean that all texts yield the same (minimum) degree of resistance to any interpretation. You got to “do more interpretative work” to get some texts to align with, say, Nazism than others.
For example, it is possible to interpret the texts in the New Testament as support of apartheid and prohibiting mixed marriages. But you need to put in a lot of work to interpret the texts this way. We know that it can be done (the old white South Africans showed this), but it is not a smooth ride, so to speak.
The corresponding question to the texts Nietzsche left us, is: How much resistance does Nietzsches texts yield to a Nazi interpretation of his writings? Or: How much resistance does Nietzsches texts yield to a left-bank-of-the-Seine existentialist interpretation of his writings? And so forth.
As far as my limited reading of Nietzsche is any guide, and if the particular question is how much resistance these texts yield to a Nazi interpretation, my conclusion would be: Not that much.
Meaning that you do not have to stretch the texts very far to make them align with how his Nazi sister interpreted the texts of her brother.
It is certainly not the only interpretation. But you have to do less interpretation-work to make them align with Nazism, than, say, to make the texts in the New Testament align with an interpretation that white south Africans are a superior race and that mixed marriages are a sin toward God.
But again, it is possible. All interpretations of all texts are possible. But all texts also yield varying degrees of resistance to an interpretation (any interpretation).
No, all "interpretations are not possible." Some are more valid than others. How can we determine this? By reading the text.
> As far as my limited reading of Nietzsche is any guide
Which you obviously haven't done.
> how much resistance these text yields to a Nazi interpretation, my conclusion would be: Not that much.
Again: *countless* books have been written about this, no doubt none of which you've read. It was the primary topic concerning Nietzsche during the 50s, 60s, and 70s. See: Walter Kaufmann.
If you ask the people that have done their homework, what do they think? That he definitely wouldn't have agreed with the Nazis. Nietzsche is explicitly against some of the foundational ideas of Nazism. This is...right in the text. If Nietzsche were alive during the 1930s, I imagine he probably would have a viewpoint somewhere between Ernst Jünger and Harry Kessler, who were both anti-Nazi but on opposite ends of the political spectrum. You probably won't get these references because as you admitted, you've done little reading on the topic.
Nietzsche's sister also didn't "stretch the texts," she reorganized them and included notes as final published materials. Again, this is a basic historical fact.
It honestly boggles my mind that people insist on having stubborn opinions about something they have a tiny amount of experience with. It's absurd. Go read the works by an author before claiming to understand anything they've said. Otherwise you're just wasting everyone's time and lowering the quality of intellectual discussion.
That was quite a broadside!
FYI I have some knowledge of these texts and the secondary literature, but I deliberately did not want to go into that, or them, since my point was and is a more general one: When an author is dead, we only have the texts, and all texts can be interpreted in different ways - for example, literally or metaphorically (and that is just for starters).
We can hit each other over the head with our different interpretations of a text (any text) till the end of days, but we cannot really falsify an interpretation - "texts" are not empirical facts the way, say, the number of legs of my cat is an empirical fact.
That said, texts yield different degrees of "resitance" to various interpretations. Admittedly "resistance" is a difficult-to-specify word, but it is the closest we can get to say that one interpretation appears "truer" than another. Be it a text on Nietzsche, or Luke, or Plato, or Wittgenstein, or Rawls - all of them dead and unable to clarify "what they actually meant" to the many who spend their only life reading and discussing texts of authors they like.
But I like your passion!
Sure, and if we use your concept of resistance, then it's obvious to anyone _that's actually done the reading_ that certain viewpoints being ascribed to authors is simply absurd and nothing more than a creative writing exercise.
As you said in your previous comment:
> As far as my limited reading of Nietzsche is any guide, and if the particular question is how much resistance these texts yield to a Nazi interpretation, my conclusion would be: Not that much
This just communicates that you know essentially nothing about the author in question, and that such an interpretation has about as much truth value as a fanfiction. You didn't present it as a fanfiction, but as an actual truth about a real person, so no, this viewpoint doesn't have much value.
The degree to which we need to clarify "what they actually meant" is a nuanced discussion focused on finer details, not on basic facts that can be easily learned from reading what they wrote and what they did during their life. Again, this is really not a controversial discussion amongst people who have knowledge of the subject matter, and your proposed relativism is not a position that any serious thinker takes seriously.
All of this is a long-winded way of saying: just read an author's books. Until you do, your opinion on what they "really meant" is not of much value.
Nietzsche is difficult to ignore, I'll grant you that.
Kinda cool treatment, and I think I get the fast and loose, expansive take, but did I actually read you right about ‘cancel culture’ not being a manifestation of mob-like scapegoating? You lost me there. Score one for RG on that one. Because however weak the actual penalty of it may be, part of Girard’s thesis is that the reward of scapegoating is as much about the catharsis it delivers to the participants, and that sure seems to be part of what drives it, whatever political or cultural angle it comes from.
It doesn't seem like very much of a catharsis if you need the catharsis every day
one claim Girard makes is that, post Christianity, the mechanism doesn’t work as well because everyone knows deep down the victim is innocent, or at least the victimization is excessive.
...Well that's just wrong. If they were that self-aware, they would be far more reluctant about cancelling people. These people aren't willingly evil, they really are trying to be good people. They're just really bad at it.
No, it seems quite accurate. The woke types are not relieved when their allegations against someone they're trying to cancel are proven wrong, they're actively saddened and disappointed.
Example?
Presumably actually executing a witch with your own hands would induce greater catharsis than just causing a witch to delete their Twitter account or lose their job.
Maybe it's because they don't get to kill them anymore. Seeing someone lose their job temporarily just isn't as satisfying as seeing them clubbed to death.
i think its an unexpected benefit of being a shallow, rootless society. We hate shallower too. you get the five minutes hate because we dont have the roots that can delay it, but when it finally breaks in a rooted society it is much worse.
Right. It's not like cancelling people tends to tone down culture war rhetoric. To me, this just seems like good ol' fashioned heretic hunting, fun for all ages, but only if you're on the side doing the hunting.
Maybe just getting someone fired is just too watered down compared to old school stoning. Cancel culture is the potato chips of catharsis.
Depends how much suffering you are trying to metabolize.
Maybe I'm not understanding catharsis or maybe I just don't hang around mobs, but I don't know of any cancellation people generally felt good about, post cancelling. Usually after someone fucks up and is Held Accountable, everyone involved just seems a) sad and exhausted b) embarrassed c) still blood thirsty. I don't think I've ever seen someone go "ah that was such good justice!! good job guys! we did it!"
Perhaps because there's no criminal penalty for most of this stuff and therefore no meaningful punishment. Not that I want there to be a punishment for wrongthink, but it seems that the lack of catharsis can be directly attributed to the lack of defining comeuppance.
You can also track the lack of harsh punishment to a large segment of the society (likely a majority) that doesn't want there to be any punishment. So whatever catharsis you would get from all of society pronouncing judgement is defrayed and there's no unity or consensus formed out of it.
As evil as it was, at least the Nazis seemed to agree to scapegoat the Jews and their other targets. Maybe this stuff doesn't work unless it's thorough.
ETA - not to in any way support the Nazis or say that they were on to something. If anything the fact that the Nazis used it effectively is another reason not to use it.
I'm not a Girardian, so I don't exactly want to defend Girard, but I do think one can steelman his perspective on the woke a bit more than Scott has done.
The idea is that Judeo-Christian concern for victims, however imperfect, was sincere; whereas the modern, ideological tendency is actually a bid for power, justified as concern for victims. Girard might point to Communist regimes and say, OK, they talk a good game about the workers, but were workers actually treated net better in Communist countries than capitalist? Wasn't the "dictatorship of the proletariat" mostly "dictatorship" and not so much "of the proletariat?" Depending on one's sympathies, one might have similar thoughts about the woke. Girard would also want to unpack this in psychological terms much more than either Scott or I have done here.
I think this is factually false. When woke people say they are "literally shaking", they are literally literally shaking. I know this because I am their psychiatrist and it really does cause them psychological harm to have to think about / deal with the sorts of things wokeness is against.
You can always come up with some galaxy-brained theory for how it's an unconscious civilization-wide bid for power even though on a conscious individual level they're genuinely concerned and unhappy, but I think strong versions of that are false, at least in a sense where any version that succeeds would also be strong enough to "prove" that nobody had ever been altruistic about anything.
Are you familiar with Freddie deBoer's new book, "How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement"?
I only listened to one of his podcasts, and I haven't yet read the book. But as I understand it, one of his main theses is that there's a disconnect between what most woke activists are fighting for and what the people they are ostensibly helping actually want. For example, most Black people are not in favor of defunding the police.
It's plausible to me that the average woke person is sincere in wanting to help victims, but that the people directing the movement have other motives.
This could be true, but I don't think that differentiates it from Christianity.
As a Christian myself, I may be biased. But I think most Christian nonprofits have a better track record of actually helping people than the Black Lives Matter movement does. Do you disagree?
I was mostly thinking of "the people directing the movement", as applied to Christianity, of being eg bishops, Popes, Billy Graham, etc.
To answer your question, I think BLM is especially bad because it was created in response to a fake moral panic. But if you were to compare the average Christian nonprofit with the average liberal antiracist woke nonprofit (which I think would be, like, an inner city free clinic, or a Campaign To End Homelessness or something) I don't think there would be a big difference.
Also, I think "sincerely wants to help people" and "has a good track record of helping people" are very different, although I'm not sure which direction this advantages.
Would the Southern Poverty Law Center fall under the "fake moral panic" bucket or "average liberal antiracist woke nonprofit"?
"compare the average Christian nonprofit with the average liberal antiracist woke nonprofit (which I think would be, like, an inner city free clinic, or a Campaign To End Homelessness or something) I don't think there would be a big difference."
I have a couple decades' experience working with both of those categories of nonprofit, without myself being part of either, and your impression is entirely right.
Campaigns To End Homelessness have a tendency to just become NGOs supporting themselves (how much does San Fran spend per homeless per year again?).
"Antiracist" being a term of art and "woke" being... something, not the best comparison either. But I get that bogging down in a definition argument is a distraction. I would venture even so that for there to be rough equivalence, we'd be comparing nonprofits that make an effort to be boots on the ground and food in hand, more than jargon-filled advertisements.
Can you explain what was/is fake about BLM? Are people of color not being discriminated against by the police?
I'm also confused regarding what "Woke" is supposed to be. Is it just white liberal paternalism? Or mob mentality? Because I'm not sure why those two things are necessarily connected. Or am I missing something?
Off-topic, but did you go to UCI? If so, +1 for ACX / "rats" being the (nicest * smartest) people there are. I wonder why that is... /s
Hey, yeah, I did! Do I know you?
I will point out that this particular example is rhetorical trickery.
People are against just decreasing funding and nothing else, but the 'Defund movement' has specific goals to spend that money on other types of community management processes that take over many of the current duties of the police and accomplish them without guns and prisons.
The polls saying that people ae against decreased funding are not offering that as an alternative.
My impression is that there's a lot of motte and bailey in this movement. "Oh, we don't actually want to defund the police, sorry for the silly naming, we just want more mental health treatment, etc." It's not convincing.
Defunding literally means 'reduce or withdraw funding', reducing funding is an entirely central use of the term, that *is* what they want, and then they want to use that extra money in the ways I described.
The 'sorry' here isn't the name being inaccurate, it's opponents intentionally misconstruing the definition of a word.
I've seen plenty of instances of people on the defund side talking about it both ways. Let's agree to disagree.
I think the Defund group lost a lot of goodwill and hurt themselves in two clear ways.
1. There are some people in the movement that literally meant 100% no funding for police. You can say the group was small or not in control, but they were and are real and make no qualms about their goals.
2. Lots of people in the movement actively put the cart before the horse, so to speak. They may have meant to channel those funds to mental health workers or whatever, but actual city councils were cutting police budgets with no plan to implement anything to replace it. The movement was using momentum from the BLM protests to get something done, and that was cutting police budgets. The work of getting something to replace it would have taken more time and effort, and instead of waiting to do it "right" by the metrics you are using, they instead chose to cut right away.
I wrote in another comment how wokeness is best understood as a religion. You are right, of course, that their actions are disconnected from their goals. But it's a mistake to conclude that they, or their leaders, are insincere about these goals. They are sincerely trying to create a better world - just not in a way that is focused on effective action (focusing instead on orthodoxy, on rites, and on communal worship). I guess it's hard for many readers of this blog to imagine that anyone would do that, but I think it describes the situation much better than conspiracy theories.
>When woke people say they are "literally shaking", they are literally literally shaking. I know this because I am their psychiatrist and it really does cause them psychological harm to have to think about / deal with the sorts of things wokeness is against.
Isn't there an obvious selection bias in that you're only seeing the subset of woke people neurotic enough to be seeing a therapist? If every Trump voter who attends AA meetings is an alcoholic, that doesn't remotely imply that every Trump voter is an alcoholic.
Also, even if we concede the point that all woke people experience literal psychic harm when reading anti-woke opinions, that doesn't imply that wokeness itself is motivated by sincere concern for victims.
If you've felt any of this rage yourself or known the people who feel it, it is clearly REAL, and common. There was no shortage of these people at my college and I dabbled myself, and I see no reason not to believe the case was the same everywhere.
"sincere concern" is hard to define though. It is a genuine rage at the qty of evidence of injustice, towards the same people, over and over. It is a completely sincere reaction to that information. It doesn't have much to do with victims DIRECTLY, it deals with the ideas of victims. Who ofc have some correspondence in the real world, often to people one DOES know.
but what abt the qty of evidence of injustice in communist or Muslim countries? or yt ppl being hunted in race riots? oh, does tht not matter bc the perps of it are not the group that we hate?
This is the whole point. If your ideological foundations are based on hatred of the good - order, civilization, freedom - then of course you will feel "sincere concern" at all those things. But that doesn't make you any less evil, because you are fully aware that your ideology stands for the destruction of those things. I'm sure there were high-ranking Nazis who were truly enraged by the existence of Jews, and genuinely wanted them to die.
I don't think the movement's ideological foundations are based on hatred of civilisation or freedom. Order's a trickier one, though it all depends on what is meant by "order"… but then it seems hard to imagine being pro-islamic fundamentalism and pro-Soviet totalitarianism while being passionately against order.
I think you err in looking for ideological foundations that would explain all woke positions. There aren't any. There are, simply, sympathetic foundations to the default attitude, and then a whole casuistic mess of arbitrary special cases, special pleading, and general abusive casuistry where one of the criteria for sympathy (usually, a group being pigenholed as victims of racism) short-circuits the thought process and prevents other lenses from being applied.
Put in practical terms, there simply isn't such a thing as a coherent political philosophy that simultaneously accounts for "queerphobia, sexism and enforced poverty are unacceptable, and we should campaign against them in all their forms as much as possible until anybody who believes in them relents", *and* for "we shouldn't criticize islamists or try to prevent them from enacting their political/societal aims". Of course there isn't. Your best attempts results in your modeling wokeists as misanthropic demons, but even that doesn't work. They're just fundamentally inconsistent for entirely understandable, non-evil reasons.
At heart they want maximum lifestyle freedom and comfort for all people, especially ones from demographics who've historically not had very much of either; they've accepted as an axiom that eradicating racism is necessary to get this; however "criticizing a belief system held primarily by non-white populations" looks racist; so they can't do that; so they can't criticize muslim fundamenlism. There's a crucial epistemological error somewhere around the 'you can't ever ever antagonize non-white populations' stage of reasoning, but no hatred of freedom is involved, just an earnest love of freedom combined with faulty reasoning and an unwillingness to acknowledge the resulting skewed result.
Agree with other reply to this re inconsistency, and I want to add: this comment section's reaction to Scott's treatment of "wokeness" is exposing a massive gulf in the characterization of what that movement is between, I think, people who learned about the underlying sentiments firsthand and were generationally sympathetic with the moral position if not the intellectual message, vs. on the other hand people whose main exposure to the movement is its late-stage and public-facing activity.
The latter, your view, I want to emphasize, *misunderstands completely*.
> If your ideological foundations are based on hatred of the good - order, civilization, freedom
"Woke" is not an ideology with ideological foundations. There is no "woke manifesto". It is a best thought of as a group of people who have taken in so much (basically true!) negative evidence against the belief that "western liberal capitalism is a just society" that they have entirely discarded this belief. For a large part, they took in this evidence during a "developmental stage" (I don't mean this in a bad way—just that people grow wiser and more capable with time) where they did not feel they had the power to do anything about it, so it all transmuted into rage and a feeling of powerlessness, such that the only thing one *could* do was agitate to convince the people who apparently DO have power and listen to these kinds of things, the middle class intelligentsia, to stop sleepwalking and take on responsibility for them.
> 'hatred of the good - order, civilization, freedom'
Not founded on at all—arrived at, because what you take to be "the good" has so much negative evidence piled on it that it's sunk into the sea, and because the virtues of that "good" always turn up as arguments *against* the things the woke movement is upset about. But this "good" seems to be insufficient to make the awfulness of the world go away, so why should we believe it's good? This, to be clear, is the right conclusion given the body of evidence they're working with. It's the methods that are immature, including the method of discarding all norms of civility to express the magnitude of your rage.
The right thing to do about it is to allow that they're making their point badly but take the emotional-moral call that our present society is fundamentally unjust, and do something about that on the basis of better principles. (E.g. New Deal welfare being institutionalized on the basis of liberal rights moreso than socialist solidarity.)
> a group of people who have taken in so much (basically true!) negative evidence against the belief that "western liberal capitalism is a just society"
Compared to what? Is there some hypothetical state of "absolute justice" that is being compared against? Western capitalism has produced the most "just" societies the world has ever seen, so these complaints are nonsense when compared to other regions of the world and other periods of history - and if you disagree, then your definition of "just" is based on fundamentally evil things. For example, if you see "inequality" as a great evil that must be minimized, regardless of the unbelievable benefits that it has brought to the world, you are a fundamentally rotten and evil person who wants to see the world burn out of pure jealousy.
> this "good" seems to be insufficient to make the awfulness of the world go away
I think I see why humanities students love this stuff so much - they just can't do math. When you have 350 million people in the country and 8 billion people in the world, if your standard for "awfulness of the world" is that every day in the news you can find at least one terrible atrocity that has happened, then of course you will think that the world is awful. Because even if the world is extremely good, by nature of having so many people, it's trivial to find at least one terrible thing to fill the news cycle with every single day.
> The right thing to do about it is to allow that they're making their point badly but take the emotional-moral call that our present society is fundamentally unjust, and do something about that on the basis of better principles
So, reward the communists?
The right thing to do is to crush them with all our might, and push for societies with the precise opposite of what they want - more freedom, capitalism, inequality, order, hierarchy, and human flourishing.
Both Occam's razor and Hanlon's razor apply here. What do you think is more likely:
A. All of these people are secretly complete sociopaths who are carefully manipulating society in order to take control.
B. These people are just flawed human beings that want to make the world a better place, just like us.
I have absolutely no idea what either razor has to do with my comment. I never suggested that every woke person was secretly a complete sociopath carefully manipulating society. Scott asserted that we know that woke people are motivated by sincere concern for society's victims because they are "literally shaking" on the couch in his office, and I pointed out that that logic doesn't follow: the fact that someone is literally shaking doesn't in and of itself prove that they care about group X or group Y.
Occam's razor suggests that it's more likely that any very large group of people is mostly filled with normal people instead of compulsive liars, and Hanlon's razor suggests that these people aren't willingly evil, just stupid.
Also, what do you even mean by "care" or "sincere concern"? If I saw someone bleeding out on the street, I would help them because 1. seeing people in pain makes me feel bad, and 2. I would feel bad if I didn't help them. Does that mean I "care" about them, or am I simply acting out of self-interest? Even though there is no such thing as true altruism, our innate empathy is what motivates us to help others, even when there's no obvious benefit. Empathy also makes us feel the pain of others as if it was our own... If feeling empathy for others doesn't count as caring about them, then nothing does.
>Occam's razor suggests that it's more likely that any very large group of people is mostly filled with normal people instead of compulsive liars, and Hanlon's razor suggests that these people aren't willingly evil, just stupid.
I wasn't talking about a "very large group of people". I was talking about the handful of woke people that Scott sees in his psychiatric practice who are "literally shaking" as a result of encountering contrary opinions.
Your second paragraph has literally nothing to do with anything I was saying.
Note that Occam's razor is meant as a very rough heuristic to use when you have absolutely no other evidence to go on, not anywhere near a law. It has nothing to do with "the simplest explanation" as is commonly misquoted - it simply recommends that if you have two competing theories with exactly the same explanatory power, you choose the one that is simpler, in information-theoretic terms, solely to avoid the unnecessary overhead of the more complex theory. (It makes no judgement about the likelihood of either theory). There is also absolutely no evidence in favor of Occam's razor, and there is quite a bit of evidence against it (see: physics).
A mix of A and B?
My abusive & narcissistic ex had genuine feelings for me & even believed that what he loved was me rather than having me around as a symbol of his own value. He was always asserting his concern for my best interests, particularly when it aligned with his own desires, & projected the perfect image of the doting boyfriend. But he certainly didn't care about my actual well-being, as he regularly endangered my life by choking me into unconsciousness instead of engaging with my complaints about his constant chasing of increasingly younger side girls whom he'd convinced would replace me as one & only just as soon as he could figure out how to remove me from his house. Of course, when I finally did leave, he used all manner of threats to attempt to force me to return, even against his own family members with whom I was staying. His proceeded to fall into a deep pit of the genuine pain he was feeling at my departure, which eventually developed into a hateful obsession that has plagued all of his subsequent relationships. None of his very REAL feelings meant that he had ever actually cared about ME. I have heard that he continues demonizing me to anyone he sleeps with more than once as the ultimate succubus that ruined his innocent admiration of womankind & left him cynical of love.
*He proceeded...*
😔no edit button, wtaf???
C. These people are just flawed human beings that want to harm, destroy, and kill the outgroup.
A criminal steals someone's car and later gets caught.
"Hey, why did you steal my car!? What's wrong with you?"
"Oh, sorry, I just thought it was my car. My bad, I'm just an idiot, so there's no need to call the police or anything. Haven't you heard of Hanlon's razor?"
Hanlon's razor was deliberately crafted to give evil people an excuse to get away with their evil deeds. It treats adults like children, and excuses the worst of our society of their evil deeds on the basis that they just didn't know better. Humans are smart, and they almost always know better.
A modified version I might be more willing to accept is "Never attribute to extreme, calculated, psychopathic malice that which is adequately explained by basic run-of-the-mill malice motivated by greed, hatred, and revenge."
It's almost like these people have never experienced reality beyond the maze of walls that must be maintained to have the luxury of even contemplating the expansion of circles of concern. But the curtain of civility is fragile veil & under the right circumstances could evaporate right before our very eyes.
*a fragile veil*
Ffs, get an EDIT function already, Substack!!!
A less galaxy-brained theory: If people get rewarded for something, they do more of it. If being overly dramatic gets them what they want, they'll be overly dramatic more often. Some of them eventually get too into the act and start literally literally shaking in their psychiatrist's office.
I think it's also that people are largely sort of dumb* and think by popularity/unexamined feelings. That is, they see all the cool people saying how XYZ should make you feel ABC, and they internalize this so that when XYZ happens they know to act like ABC — and probably really do feel, to some extent, the attendant emotions.
I'm not sure I wanna go into detail, because then we'll start arguing about the example, but I went through something widely regarding as a Big Deal™ for a kid to go through — but I didn't know that, and it's never really bugged me, then or now.
(Conversely, I had a friend from Nigeria who loved computers, his classes, and America... until some of the staff started telling him probably he wasn't wanted at such a white school and it must be hard and does he need special treatment etc etc...
(Nearly dropped out before either I convinced him or he saw for himself — mostly the latter I think but I want some credit for trying okay — that no, no one was, say, mispronouncing his name *out of hatred.* Now he's a happy Red Teamer who makes more than I do, damn him!)
------------------------------
*You may think I'm just dunking on normies because I'm a vengeful nerd. Not so, my friends; no, it's because I have to send emails and make phone calls to normies all day every day — and you would not fucking believe how easy it is to lose them.
e.g., I keep having weird disjointed conversations with people because I try to say something with >2 parts and they can't chain them together past that. I've given up on conditionals altogether — give them ONE thing at a time, and only move to the next once YOU choose the requisite branch.
These people can barely even read, for Chrissake...
This could be true, but I don't think that differentiates it from Christianity.
Perhaps the mechanism is domestication. If we start with a wolf, domestication seems good for a long time. One day a Chihuahua is literally shaking for no reason and a dawning sense of horror informs us that perhaps wolves weren't really so bad.
That's humanity since agriculture.
This is... the most amazing comment I have read in a long time. Masterful and concise. You win the internet. More of this, please.
"When woke people say they are "literally shaking", they are literally literally shaking."
I imagine the most sensitive of them are, the kind of well-meaning and well-intentioned people you encounter, the ones who have to check under the bed every night in case Trump is lurking there, who read and believe the "New Fascism is on the rise, Trump blatantly planning to be Literal Hitler when he wins next election" pieces already coming out in the media.
But I think in the wider fetid swamp of hot takes on social media, there are a lot of people who aren't shaking but who know what lingo to use in order to "see my KoFi, Kickstarter, Patreon, Venmo me money" activate the readers.
I was already thinking about the types who go "Well Ackshully Aztec human sacrifice wasn't that bad! Sacrificial victims were honoured and treated exceptionally well! The people selected thought it was an honour and they were devout in their participation in the religion! In short - Spanish conquistadors wicked evil bad, and anything they said about human sacrifice wrong!"
And I'm going "No, people damn well didn't love the notion of being selected to be victims. The Aztecs genuinely believed it was necessary, but part of the reason so many subject and 'allied' kingdoms helped the Spanish was because they hated being part of this, not because they wanted 'No no, we love and cherish the idea of being honoured victims' to remain". The Conquistadors may indeed have been wicked evil bad, but they replaced the ribcages cracked open and hearts cut out, the child-victims for the rain god beaten so they would weep in order to evoke the sympathetic magic of rain fall, the priests dressing in the flayed skins of the victims - all to keep the natural world existing and working - with the once-for-all sacrifice of the God who died for you.
Catharsis is a good explanation for the unity in the wake of the bout of violent explosion of emotion and tension and mob psychology when the scapegoat victim is sacrificed, literally *or* symbolically as with cancel culture. Look at the 'spirit of the Blitz' or the immediate wake of 9/11 for a violent event bringing about national unity and the burial of differences in common sense of group cohesion.
> there are a lot of people who aren't shaking but who know what lingo to use in order to "see my KoFi, Kickstarter, Patreon, Venmo me money" activate the readers.
I also know marketing people who are doing this for corporations and they aren’t unconsciously doing it as a bid for power, they’re consciously doing it and saying they’re using this language for marketing purposes.
Aren’t the readers the ones who are shaking then? This seems a bit like arguing cigarettes aren’t really addictive by pointing out that the actors in the ads aren’t even really smokers.
I guess the problem is with the ambiguous usage of "the woke people", which might refer to the producers of wokeness, or to the consumers of wokeness.
The consumers are shaking; the producers are pointing at Patreon accounts.
The sorts of people who literally shake at stuff probably don't become powerful politicians. Perhaps it is only the leaders who are insincere, and they take advantage of the neurosis of the woke masses.
This could be either opportunistic or a deliberate plot in which they encourage the neurosis on purpose, depending on how far into conflict theory territory you want to go.
Sociopathic leaders can’t explain wokeness though; almost tautologically they don’t care what ideology they’re using. So why are they using wokeness now, instead of Naziism or Sikhism or whatever, unless it’s arisen genuinely and independently?
Nazism is out of fashion. Most people already know it's a trap, so from the sociopathic leader's perspective it's "used up".
If woke stuff ever gets out of fashion, neurotic people will find something else to literally shake about and sociopaths will find another niche to fill.
See Adam's comment on Goodharting, which I agree with.
I don't doubt that woke people who report psychological pain are actually experiencing psychological pain. I don't doubt that they are sincere in this immediate subjective sense. I also don't doubt that Lenin, who murdered millions, was sincere in this immediate subjective sense.
I don't think it takes anything close to a galaxy-brained theory to understand that power over others is a basic human drive and can manifest itself in social interactions at various level, some of them disguised, even to oneself. I think we literally see this at work in social interactions –– interpersonally, online, politically –– every single day.
I believe there is a mundane, common-sense version of the above that doesn't require you to be a Freudian, Nietzschean, Girardian, or anything fancy at all.
Seems like whenever a belief system, religious or otherwise, achieves normative dominance in a particular community, you'll find in that community:
- people who believe sincerely and deeply
- people who believe in a superficial and unreflective way
- people who don't belive
- people who are ambivalent
...among the less believing and non believing groups, many will go along anyway, some just enough to check the box and be left alone, more or less grudgingly, like the famous greengrocer, others with a great deal of false enthusiasm, for the sake of their own advantage, and still others will go along for the sake of recruiting true believers into more altruistic projects
...among the true believers, some will channel their anxieties and neuroses through the beliefs, some will channel their megalomania or narcissism through the beliefs
...many individuals will fit several of these descriptions and the same time and/or sequietially, and you'll find all types at every level, from the rank and file to the highest inner circles
Again, this seems to hold true across a wide variety of communities/belief systems.
I get to observe DEI up close in a real institution. To me it looks like mostly intra-elite status games. I'm sure some of the people playing the games literally shake and cry about social injustices in therapy, and some dont.
Huh.... I've actually never even considered the possibility that someone saying "literally shaking" might be literally shaking. It's always seemed like such over the top melodrama, especially given the benign contexts I've heard it being used in.
One person is literally shaking; hundred people saw this person and now they pretend to be him; thousand people write "I am shaking" because they see that this is what everyone else is writing.
Yeah, this seems most likely to me. Or perhaps they force themselves to shake with emotion in some subconscious way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic
"A moral panic is a widespread feeling of fear, often an irrational one, that some evil person or thing threatens the values, interests, or well-being of a community or society.[1][2][3] It is "the process of arousing social concern over an issue",[4] usually perpetuated by moral entrepreneurs and mass media coverage, and exacerbated by politicians and lawmakers.[1][4] Moral panic can give rise to new laws aimed at controlling the community.[5]"
I really like the Wiki definition here and how it differentiates the roles of different folks during the moral panic.
Agreed! It is a great capsule summary.
Heck, I was literally literally shaking just reading this piece, but from the other side, from having to deal with wokeness. You are, I assume, familiar with the theory that the attitudes behind wokeness involve anti-CBTing yourself into having (more) trauma?
I mentioned below that these sort of open-ended ethical commitments provide free energy, gated by imperfect legibility, incentivizing agents to claim that energy by shaping themselves into something that appears to the imperfect perception as a deserving recipient. Putting aside culture war and current events, I also worry about how this will affect future iterations of AI.
Wokeness is a religion, much like catholicism. Its proponents are sincere. But they focus not on effective action to alleviate suffering, but on correct beliefs (orthodoxy). This is why they devote so much attention to heretics like J. K. Rowling, who broke with woke orthodoxy. They also value rites like recycling and communal worship like pro-Palestine demonstrations, where their priests give sermons and the laity joins in communal chants that help bind the community together. You go off track if you try to understand wokeness in secular rationalist terms.
<i>You can always come up with some galaxy-brained theory for how it's an unconscious civilization-wide bid for power even though on a conscious individual level they're genuinely concerned and unhappy,</i>
Is it really that galaxy-brained? Motivated reasoning is a well-known phenomenon. Think of, say, a guy whose wife is obviously cheating on him, but who manages to convince himself that she's actually faithful. It doesn't seem at all weird or implausible to say that on a conscious level he genuinely thinks his wife's been loyal, but unconsciously he can't bear the shame of being a cuckold. When it comes to political views, I don't see any implausibility in supposing that a person, or even a large number of people, is consciously sincere in his beliefs, but unconsciously wants to legitimate his feelings of resentment towards those who seem to be better-off.
<i>at least in a sense where any version that succeeds would also be strong enough to "prove" that nobody had ever been altruistic about anything.</i>
The fact that the wokest spaces also tend to be among the most unpleasant -- the most censorious, most given to purity spirals, etc. -- should make us more sceptical about wokeness' claims to altruism.
> When woke people say they are "literally shaking", they are *literally literally* shaking. I know this because I am their psychiatrist and it *really does cause them psychological harm* to have to think about / deal with the sorts of things wokeness is against.
Wait, I understand this might be obnoxious but I really can’t tell from your phrasing. Have you actually observed your patients having involuntary, repetitive muscle contractions causing tremulous motions of the body due to above mentioned thoughts, or are you just using “literally shaking” in the sense of “disturbed emotionally”?
And when you say “think about / deal with the sorts of things wokeness is against”, where does that fall on the scale from “they were beaten by five skinheads because they were black” to “they saw a non-Mexican wearing a sombrero”?
Isn't another difference that Christian morality is, almost by definition, voluntary, while "woke" morality is codified in rules and enforced--either by "the mob" or by the government. When we are coerced into being kind, we are not really being kind.
This feels pretty No True Scotsman to me given that Christianity has been codifying and enforcing standards of behavior on people for most of its history.
And heck if you take Christian doctrine at face value it involves enforcing a specific set of beliefs on people under threat of eternal torment so I'm not sure how you could call that really voluntary.
I don't think this is a legitimate distinction. Christian morality has only been "voluntary" for about the last five minutes of human history. Prior to that it was the state religion in most countries in the Americas, Europe, Oceania and large parts of Africa. In most of these countries, official state-run schools educated children explicitly in accordance with the dictates of a Christian faith (the US is quite the outlier in Western countries for separation of church and state). Numerous countries banned "Monty Python's Life of Brian" on its initial release in the 1970s on the grounds that it was blasphemous, and blasphemy is still a crime in many Christian nations.
And even then the US Congress has a chaplain and Washington has a national cathedral.
And to the extent that churches did that, they were very similar to the "wokerati" of today. "Moral busybodies" as CS Lewis called this type. There is nothing in the bible that condones this, though. Real Christian faith--and any charitable behaviour that stems from it-- MUST be freely given.
> Christian morality is, almost by definition, voluntary
What? If you don't do the right thing you are tortured for eternity. And in the temporal world for most of the time that Christianity was dominant going against it meant you were, at best, a social outcast, at worst firewood
I am a thorough-going atheist, and this sort of reasoning is what, in my youth, took me there. But in the decades since, I have been exposed to the thinking of lots of Christian intellectuals whose take is much more nuanced—Hell is separation from God and is entirely due to the volition of the individual who has spurned God. C S Lewis describes this at length, but you can see traces of it even back in Marlowe’s Faustus, in which Mephistopheles says, when asked about Hell, says *this* is Hell, and he’s never out of it.
It doesn’t convince me, but it makes me unwilling to indulge in straw-men.
"Hell is separation from God"
Come to think of it, under this interpretation there could be a dozen mutually hostile deities, all threatening their non-followers with separation from deity[index_i#], all being perfectly correct about this, and none of the followers of deity[index_i#] being one whit concerned about separation from all deity[index_j# != index_i]. It has an appealing (to me) symmetry and humor.
True enough, I suppose, but certainly none of such gods is the God that Christians believe in.
True!
"Straw-men" is the wrong phrase here - there are absolutely are Christian thinkers with more nuanced views, but there are also plenty without.
Either "weak-men" or possibly even "men of median strength, when you're used to dealing with unusually strong men", I think.
All of this seems rather hard to square with Jesus literally describing a "lake of fire."
Agreed, though Jesus was perhaps talking to people who were less nuanced than C S Lewis. And this was in the context of cutting off a hand that offends you, which was surely not meant to be taken literally.
Not so much a "bid for power," but "a corrupted, Goodhart's law-ified zombie version of the original concern." A thing called "victimhood" has been selected as a measure of goodness. We want to be good, therefore we must find and support "victimhood." This incentivizes a dilution and instrumentalization of "victimhood", makes it easier for the entire system to get hijacked by charlatans and cynical operators, and privileges appearance and image (i.e. being seen to be doing good) over actual substance.
this is really well-put thanks
Yes - and I think this is how you get the recurring pattern (seen here as well) of SA (not to single him out, this is so commonplace) of any piece on any subject touching ethical or social matters having an obligatory "take racism, well we can agree racism is pretty bad, right?" moment.
[I'm going to skip the part where I avow, for safety's sake, that racism is bad, within this comment, lest we get all Droste-cocoa-y.]
There are many behaviors that are bad, but in some fashion we have reduced sin to one behavior, cringingly so. I mean, the example is never "take hostility, take cruelty to children, take gluttony, take meanness, take sloth, take sexual incontinence, take dishonesty, take violence ..."
I am not sure why racism was chosen. When you put it next to, say, murder, it seems a lesser bad - undesirable - and something to which the best among us are immune - but a possibly ineradicable part of human nature, especially as the definition shifts to more and more anodyne behavior. I think you could have a society where people were governed by the morality we've discarded, and still feel whatever they feel or think whatever they think regarding The Other - which may be hardwired in the brain - and things could go pretty well, maybe even better than they do at present. Because rules for conduct recognize human fallibility and try to mitigate it, not posit a utopia of shiny minds.
I think of an anecdote I heard one time. It concerned my Southern in-laws - people you would surely deem racist for a) having lived in the time of segregation; b) being one of the few white families in a small black town, and thus giving employment to blacks from a position of greater wealth; c) having been aware of racial differences though not alarmed about them, or feeling that they required a great deal of social engineering; and d) not having hated the South in which they lived, nor thought it particularly more broken or bad than the rest of the country.
So - racists, in current parlance.
A relative had married a man from *elsewhere*, and he was visiting the house, and there was some question about some or other thing that needed to be done, I don't remember what.
The visitor said something along the lines of "well, why don't you just get a couple of n*****s" to do whatever.
Frosty silence. They were too polite to confront him over this solecism, but they never forgot it, as when this man's name came up decades later, this anecdote was all that surfaced; and it fixed him in their mind as not merely vulgar but Not Their Sort. And their distaste for him was not merely due to their own sensibilities, but a genuine dismay that people they cared about, who worked in the house, might have heard him.
Yes, I agree with this formulation. Goodharting is how this actually comes to pass over time -- but also, it's a psychologically internalized Goodharting.
Yeah, it provides free energy to the system, gated by imperfect legibility, incentivizing agents to claim that energy by shaping themselves into something that appears to the imperfect perception as "a victim".
>but were workers actually treated net better in Communist countries than capitalist?
This isn't as obvious as it might seem at first glance. Homelessness and joblessness were very low in the USSR, and average calories consumed (a decent measure of the conditions of the very-worst-off) was higher than the USA's for much of its history.
It wasn't some shining paradise, but outside of Stalin it wasn't completely awful either (in much of the former Eastern Bloc, the Communist Parties are still around and still get non-negligible support; look up Die Linke for an example, even though it's collapsed recently). It was kind of mediocre.
'Homelessness and joblessness were very low in the USSR, and average calories consumed (a decent measure of the conditions of the very-worst-off) was higher than the USA's for much of its history.'
1) These are incredibly low bars for a European country in the 20th century
2) Average calories consumed is not, in fact a decent measure of the conditions of the very worst off. All developing countries have abandoned this measure because as economies develop even to per capita incomes well below those of the USSR, average calories consumed actually drop, and significantly so
And
3) All data that emerged from the USSR, on which you're basing these statements, has proven to be deeply suspect
I lived in communist Poland and I concur. At least near the end of the regime everybody knew that it was a failure.
> as economies develop even to power capita [per capita?] incomes well below those of the USSR, average calories consumed actually drop, and significantly so
Why is this?
Because the process of countries becoming richer involves their population doing less manual labour
If you can't fault your opponents acts because they are good acts, then make up secret sinister unverifiable motives for those acts and fault those instead.
This is certainly the strategy at play with calling everyone on the right racist and sexist and etc. Good to see that both sides make use of it.
Of course, these are human dynamics, not pathologies unique to some particular group of "bad people." And understanding these dynamics does not free one from the need to evaluate particular actors and tendencies. Facts matter, a lot.
But it's naive merely to say, "Person X experiences psychological pain, therefore their concerns should be taken entirely at face value, end of story."
This shit (NOT the review, that's great, Girad's book itself) needs to be exiled from academia or clearly labeled as wild speculation rather than serious argument. Maybe some ideas in here are worth exploring or it's aesthetically worthwhile but the same can be said for novels yet we all recognize the danger in calling a work of fiction, no matter how good, non-fiction.
It's an interesting suggestion but that's just a few paragraphs -- the problem is the pretense that everything else in the book constitutes an argument that means it warrants serious consideration. It's not harmless and fun or interesting exploration -- it's pretending that the use of methods of analogical and incautious reasoning that we have piles of evidence are misleading are worthwhile. Ultimately, the value in a subject is as much (probably more) about it's ability to exclude bad work as to sanctify good work. When we allow badly reasoned crap like Girad to be passed off as valuable philosophy we undermine our whole epistemic system. Doesn't matter if his conclusion is correct or not the method is fundamentally unreliable and the constant game so many academics play to hide this fact is deeply disturbing.
The standard reaction when I object to this kind of work to people at philosophy conferences is to either point to some value this stuff has in inspiring ideas or an appeal to the same kind of cultural appreciation we have for novels.
But if that's really the reason then nothing is lost if we just make it super clear that there are wild trippy speculations and serious philosophical arguments and clearly label them as such -- use less prejorative terms if you want just make them stick. Sure, there will be edge cases but label the clear ones.
The very fact that people object strongly to this gives away the game. The reason this kind of stuff is seen as valuable is because it borrows credibility from the serious part of the subject -- and that's the problem.
--
Sure, if you don't think philosophy serves any purpose other than elite entertainment it doesn't matter. But then I expect you to shut up about it's importance when you look for funding and support. OTOH if you really believe that philosophy serves this important role in helping people understand the world and avoiding mistakes allowing shit like this to masquerade as if the same kind of thing is a big problem.
Thank you. The book sounds like such a huge waste of time that I don’t seee the point of even reviewing it.
I wouldn't go that far. I think there can be a place for quite wild speculation and weak argument. This speculation is pretty unconvincing but it's worth reviewing to appreciate that.
But it's really important this not be treated as anything but speculation by giving it the moniker of more academic credibility.
I mean I wouldn't have bothered to read and review it but I mean if the alternative was just the reviewer reading a novel well then at least we learn it's as unconvincing as we expected.
Arguably bad but popular books are worth reviewing just to not recommend them, or to extract the interesting ideas while discarding the rest.
I mean ... I would tend to agree... but then again: you must be aware that you are exemplifying "Satan" in your comment, right?
Sorry, not quite following. He doesn't need to be punished he merely needs to not be given the authority of academic respectability -- no different than the status for any other author.
Step 1: everyone in the land of "academia" wants the good hair: physicists want to be like mathematicians, economists have physics envy, social scientists succumb to economic imperialism and so forth. Everyone wants rigor and "serious argument", few can afford it. You get among the disciplines many copies of each other.
Step 2: The "epistemic system" is in crisis. Maybe partially because of "badly reasoned crap" but much more so because of an avalanche of mind-numbing, ill-conceived incrementalism: academics write grant applications in which they somehow are supposed to already know the results they will obtain; they proudly wear their good hair applying unsuitable but ostensibly rigorous methods to ever more domains; empiricists get the replication crisis for their troubles and theorists find themselves constructing maths-monstrosities to deal with a special case of a special case of the special theory of special niche phenomenon. Mostly they are "basically pleasant bureaucrats" but sometimes they allow themselves to despair for a few moments, wondering what happened to the young person who wanted to tackle big questions.
Step 3: Gotta exile the contrarian obscurantist necromancer (Con): "This shit needs to be exiled from academia or clearly labeled as wild speculation rather than serious argument. (...) When we allow badly reasoned crap like Girad to be passed off as valuable philosophy we undermine our whole epistemic system. Doesn't matter if his conclusion is correct or not the method is fundamentally unreliable and the constant game so many academics play to hide this fact is deeply disturbing."
Step 4 & 5: Once the Con and his seductive continental ideas have been exiled and quarantined, we can enjoy them guilt-free! Let's have two regalia: "serious philosophical arguments" and "wild trippy speculations". Nothing wrong with the latter, in fact maybe we should be less pejorative and call it "religion".
I don't see how this doesn't end up applying to all distinctions drawn everywhere? Anytime we need to exert effort to maintain some clear distinction one side of the distinction will be seen as higher status than the other (tho most of the world goes the other way on religion).
I mean, how does this not apply with equal force to the physicist working for a publisher who rejects the great Gatsby's publication as a work of physics?
--
More technically, I'd say that to take this notion seriously you must believe there is a principled distinction between failing to grant some on net beneficial status and punishment or every distinction becomes an instance of punishment and the concept becomes kinda useless.
What I have written, I have written.
How can a comment be more spot on than this one? I stand in awe
It certainly sounds like one of these things it's easy to internally confuse the sentiment "it certainly *would* be interesting if the world *did* work like this" with "yes, that's how the world *does* work" - a thought pattern that I believe that all too commonly seduces people to believe in and advocate all sorts of nonsense.
Yes, but that's true of many things. But usually academic standards work to keep this fallacy at bay but see my other comment for a long discussion of the particular way this hacks those norms
(short version -- understanding it requires you invest mental work so you feel like you've done something of intellectual worth and you're invested in it and read in your spin. Then because of this if you challenge the value it's easy to dismiss you as not having really understood it -- because the critic realizes that requiring lots of effort to decode decreases epistemic value but in effect this gets turned on its head.)
A book that starts off with ancient myths and later wends its way to Nietzche is pretty much gauranteed to become a bullshit geyser in the final section.
What about a course with ancient myths which later wends its way to Nietzsche? Isn’t that a philosophy course.
I don't know anything about this book beyond Scott's review, but I don't understand your objection.
Either you're complaining that philosophy is not based in science (you refer to lack of evidence), or you're complaining specifically about continental philosophy that is unclearly and non-rigorously argued.
If the former, well that's what philosophy is. Far from being a subset of science, science started as a subset of philosophy. Now it's separated, leaving philosophy to deal with non-evidential matters of a prioroi thought. Unless you've figured out a way the scientific method can answer questions like "why trust the scientific method" and "how can you be sure the external world is real" (which would itself require philosophy) I don't see how one can object to that.
If the latter, well I find it very annoying as well but that's the deliberate style of the whole tradition. Writing vaguely and "artistically" instead of rigorously does allow for the expression of many kinds of arguments, ideas, connections, and processes that couldn't be easily expressed otherwise. And in any case, if it's a deliberate style (which it is) it's not a failure.
The objection is to the second and my complaint is in some sense really with analytic philosophers who allow continental style philosophy to be regarded as if it was part of the same project of truth discovery. I don't care what name who gets but you can't treat them as part of the same project.
It's no different than if physics started allowing theologians to start working in their departments and call themselves physicists and then when the issue was raised just say: well that's their tradition. You are misleading the undergrads who really don't understand that Nietzsche isn't even the same sort of thing as Carnap (just as they'd be mislead if they went to a class called physics 200 and were lectured about theology in a way that was vaguely continuous with QM).
Besides, I don't think your defense of the continental philosophy as 'thats their tradition' holds up. If that's all that was going on they'd stand up and say: "no no, we aren't in that buisness of establishing truth via reasoning we're engaged in this other literary project." If you ask them what they are doing they'll insist they are discovering what's true and indeed many if not most will claim to actually be a superior method to analytic philosophy. If that's not enough to say: nope sorry that's just bad methodology then the same defense could be used for astrology or really any practice.
Ultimately, my sense is that 'continental' philosophy is stealing legitimacy from other parts of philosophy and if it was was really cut loose I think it would gradually just be merged in people's minds with the vague confusing theories in English/etc and not be taken too seriously.
--
Besides, philosophy, as the subject which is tasked (or at least does) act as a kind of reasoning police butting into other disciplines to question the validity of practices in physics, to raise methodological worrier re: replication crisis etc has a particularly strong burden here. If you aren't dedicated to trying to actually improve the reasoning ability of UGs then stop claiming that's what you are doing -- and I see in actual philosophy papers that UGs reasoning is very much made worse by the fact they don't realize that reading Nietzsche in one class is a totally different subject than the analytic class.
if the people engaged in "continental" philosophy (since the label is a matter of dispute) were
Ah, so basically this is the old "English versus Continental philosophy" ding-dong and you're an Analytical. That explains the ire!
Hmm, let me try that in a shorter form.
In what sense is 'continental' philosophy not just bad philosophy? Is it just that it's traditional? We'd never accept that response as a reason to allow homeopaths to keep publishing studies without controls in the medical literature. We'd judge that having a bunch of people refuse to accept the importance of the placebo effect didn't make them correct. And the same holds true if some recalcitrant branch of mathematicians had resisted the revolution in formalism and insisted on continuing to publish the problematic proofs that lead to the paradoxes in early analysis.
So that gets to the fundamental question. Is philosophy a truth oriented discipline like medicine, physics or math? I believe it is and that means tradition is no defense for bad work.
Not a professional philosopher (and maybe that's a good thing in this context) but I got heavily exposed to continental philosophy from high school onwards and always maintained a deep interest in the subject afterwards. So take my point of view with a grain of salt. In my opinion as soon as you ask "is philosophy a truth oriented discipline like medicine" you are already on the wrong track. You have a model of how philosophy should or should not work and it's a model you base on empirical science, medicine in this case. You are swallowing whole an unproblematized, uncritical notion of truth and that's a non starter. The point of philosophy is to transcend this! What is even truth? It seems that you assume you know the answer, at least in a "I know it when I see it" fashion. With this premise, comparing philosophy to any other "truth oriented discipline" is a major exercise in missing the point. It's like assuming that all functions should be computable and then being like of course the busy beaver is not a function, right? It's not computable.
If you don't know what truth is than what's the difference between philosophy and astrology?
To put the point a bit less quipishly, once you accept that there are some things that ought to be judged as valid/valuable works of philosophy and others that aren't then you've adopted a metric just as I have. Pretending you haven't or there isn't a metric doesn't make it go away it just obscures what it is.
And that's the problem here. If you really want to just jettison the whole idea that some arguments are better or more justified than others you can't then turn around and defend a system that does exactly that. You're trying to have it both ways.
Everyone is applying some standard the question is just whether your standard is what's traditional or has a certain feel or if it's more clearly stated based on evidence that standard seems to yield good outcomes in the cases we can agree on value.
My understanding is that admitting that the notion of truth is problematic does not automatically engender a situation where we must accept every argument, no matter how devoid of internal consistency or empirical content. Philosophy is a social/dialogic exercise, where more than one person is involved; people will individually (and/or collectively) engage with an argument to ultimately accept it or reject/refine it. So rejecting a fixed, external notion of truth (whose universal acceptance would in my opinion inevitably either ossify philosophy or give rise to a new discipline restricted in object and method, similarly to what happened already countless times with the birth of physics, psychology, etc.) does not rule out the possibility of building/approximating such a notion dialectically.
Sure, I don't have an issue with saying truth is hard. Hell there is plenty of analytic content along those lines.
But notice you've implicitly accepted the goal is to produce better arguments and that we need to evaluate them based on some metric. Ok great, we can now try to figure out what that metric should be. All I mean by truth conducive in this context is that there are some things that seem appealing but aren't good reasons for belief and others that are and we want standards that favor the latter.
But you now have to give reasons and defend them for why the continental approach qualifies. You can't use the fact that you are trying to problematize the notion of truth as a means of avoiding the question of whether these are methodologically successful ways of doing so.
In general everywhere else we look being more explicit, giving clear definitions and being pedantic is judged to improve our ability to decide which arguments are better so I think of you want to jettison this idea you need an argument for why and you can't just say: well I'm problematizing that to avoid doing so.
Do you think there are arguments of a form someone like me would see as persuasive that justify the methodology in continental philosophy or do you think it's entirely justified on its own terms?
If you say the later I obviously can't convince you otherwise but it's rational for me to treat it exactly the way I do christian theology and you also shouldn't think I should be persuaded either. Just that I should accept different foundational values/epistemology.
A more SJW way of putting the point is that continental philosophy isn't jettisoning judgements of worth/truth it's just saying we value the kind of stuff that ticks the boxes of traditional status like engaging with statusful historical figures and having lots of footnotes.
When you get to the bottom the question is how do you pick the rule that distinguishes work that gets the imprintor of academic value from that which doesn't. The continental answer is: whatever flatters the kind of people who have tended to do this kind of thing in the past and went to grad school and I don't think that's a sufficent answer to justify the implicit request for public/alumni funding
See above; if the alternative to 'engaging with a statusful of historical figures and having lots of footnotes' is pretending that somehow we have access to a universal notion of truth or more generally to some universal, agreed upon method to pursue such truth, then we would just be swapping a (critical, dialectical) acceptance of the importance of past tradition for an (uncritical, dogmatic) acceptance of the importance of whatever ideology is dominant in $current_year.
What is your objection to Girard's proposition? I see a lot of yelling in this comment but nothing that tells me what you disagree with or why. You don't accept that "throughout history people often dealt with crisis by selecting a scapegoat or victim to blame for misfortunes and calamities (e.g. "the plague is because those Jews poisoned the wells!"), they gathered together in a mob and executed or drove out the selected victim; afterwards, they felt justified that they had behaved correctly because the victim was self-evidently evil or malign. Christianity took this narrative, but flipped it around that the victim was blameless and the mob at fault. Over the centuries, society took this idea, isolated it, exaggerated it, and now in modern society we have a Cult of Victimhood where everything is the fault of structural racism and the like"?
If not, why not? Where is the point of disagreement, what is your alternative view? All I am getting from your comment is "Girard is dumb, people who like him are dumb, everyone is dumb" but not *why* they're dumb.
To his proposition, nothing in particular. I mean if pushed my sense is that it's pretty vague, poorly defined and to the extent I understand it not something I'd assign a high prior to but his claim could be the sky is blue for all that it matters here.
What's relevant is that the book (you can read enough to get the sense on Google books) is quite a bad argument for his claims. But even still, if it was just a really long blog post it would just be another really unconvincing (if tediously long) blog post but there are plenty of Hanson's posts that I find unconvincing (if much clearer).
My objection is ultimately to the fact that works like this get treated like serious scholarship and I think that allows it to implicitly borrow credibility (TBF Girad himself isn't particularly studied in philosophy courses which is why I avoided the whole continental thing initially but it borrows credibility from the fact it's continuous with philosophy and that while philosophers would happily call out bad methods of reasoning in physics various incentives push them not to do so for this type of thing).
And yes the emotional ire is because I care about philosophy as a truth oriented subject which, just like math or physics, needs methodologies that help avoid errors in any work that wants to be taken academically seriously and works like this do the opposite and court methodologies we know to be error inducing and thus when people treat works like this as if they are serious scholarship continuous with philosophy (and I doubt anyone would take it seriously if it was a blog post) that threatens something I care about dearly.
...Did we read the same post? Scott made it very clear that all the arguments that connected the phenomenon to Christianity were complete bullshit. Scott's book reviews aren't endorsements; hell, most of them barely have anything to do with what's written in the book. They're just excuses to talk about interesting stuff. In this case, that thing is the *potential* connection between Christian slave mentality and the current "woke" culture.
And I'm not critisizing Scott. I don't think he is giving this author academic credibility. I like the review which is why I pushed back on the people who said it was worthless.
Indeed, I think Scott's review is exactly the sort of thing that's needed in academia -- if we had more of this (which is essentially the nice way of saying here's the idea but there just isn't a good argument here) and fewer people treating the work as having merit merely because it follows a certain tradition in presentation and argumentative style I'd be happy.
Ohh I see the confusion "This sort of shit" refers to Girad not the review.
I mean, Girard is clearly doing one of those "here is an extremely simple Pattern I have spotted that explains All of History; let me substantiate that by proposing a bunch of cherry-picked examples and discarding all the evidence to the contrary and then argue we must use the Pattern as a guide to the future" things. It's always, invariably, unerringly bad. Bad history, bad sociology, bad philosophy. In this case the specific Pattern is also more insane because it's pretty much all revolving around Girard's own specific religious pet peeves. "Christianity literally introduced the very ideas of victimhood/compassion/mercy/forgiveness to humanity" or such is a whole category of arguments that Christian apologists use to try and claim their religion is superior to all other philosophies, a very easily disproven argument at that if one takes a minimally critical look at pre-Christian literature and history and sees the precise same humans with the precise same wants and feelings as present day ones as far as the eye can see, though of course shaped by different material conditions and social structures. The "pre-Christian humanity could not even conceive of empathizing with victims" notion is as absurd as the "ancient Greeks literally could not see blue" one, and made of the same cloth. It's an extraordinary claim that would require extraordinary evidence and is instead merely substantiated with vague gesturing towards the Pattern, and this apparently is ok because "philosophy" is not a discipline that needs to hold itself to standards such as their arguments actually not contradicting our lying eyes and ears, as long as they're elegant enough.
In the wake of "are electrons real?" discourse on Twitter, if one wants to know why is it that so many scientists hold philosophy in such low regard, look no further than stuff like this. As Peter says, this is not academia, these are the rants of a nutjob, and should be treated by philosophy with the same attitude with which astronomers will treat someone claiming that Planet Nibiru is home to the Ancient Aliens who bootstrapped human civilization.
Sorry for getting back to you late.
Okay, I think we need to pour some cold water on this debate to cool it down.
Let's look at what Girard is saying in light of Christianity as a *philosophy* and not a religion (and not fighting out its truth claims).
Also, Girard is talking about Western Civilisation which does derive (or claims to derive) from both the Classical World (Greece and Rome mainly) *and* Judaeo-Christian tradition.
So in the light of that, what makes Western society different? He's claiming (it seems) that we have taken one particular element of Christian belief, detached it from the context of the religion, secularised it, and made that the ruling ethic of our measure of progress: compassion for the victims.
I think I can agree with that, since the one thing I see constantly online when people are discussing everything that is (one might say) culture war is that atheists, agnostics, free thinkers, non-Christians, non-believers, and general secular types is "I thought you Christians were about love"? Nobody talks about the soul, the nature of the Trinity, etc. but "Jesus said love, right?" Love love love.
It's how the liberal Christians differentiate themselves from the traditional types: "Jesus never said anything about abortion/gay rights/trans/what have you!" but they're very quick off the bat to quote the texts about "love your neighbour", "love your enemy", "God is love" and so forth.
So charity/compassion/the valorisation of the victim and victimhood: the measure of progress in the Pinker sense of "things are getting better and better":
"Instead, [Pinker] argues that: "The way to explain the decline of violence is to identify the changes in our cultural and material milieu that have given our peaceable motives the upper hand."
Okay, so what made the West (and let's limit our range of enquiry to that) change from "you can seize your debtor's children and sell them as slaves" to where we are today, where "wokeness" is the Leviathan of our times?
"4 Now the wife of one of the sons of the prophets cried to Elisha, “Your servant my husband is dead, and you know that your servant feared the Lord, but the creditor has come to take my two children to be his slaves.” 2 And Elisha said to her, “What shall I do for you? Tell me; what have you in the house?” And she said, “Your servant has nothing in the house except a jar of oil.” 3 Then he said, “Go outside, borrow vessels from all your neighbors, empty vessels and not too few. 4 Then go in and shut the door behind yourself and your sons and pour into all these vessels. And when one is full, set it aside.” 5 So she went from him and shut the door behind herself and her sons. And as she poured they brought the vessels to her. 6 When the vessels were full, she said to her son, “Bring me another vessel.” And he said to her, “There is not another.” Then the oil stopped flowing. 7 She came and told the man of God, and he said, “Go, sell the oil and pay your debts, and you and your sons can live on the rest.”
It's not that ancient people have no notion of compassion or forgiveness or mercy, but that the circle to which it applied was limited (and we see that even today in the arguments over Effective Altruism being more concerned with the poor overseas than the needy at home). The argument is that Christianity moved that circle to wider and wider boundaries, from "my family/my clan/my neighbours/my tribe" to "anyone in need".
See the anti-slavery medallion of 1787: "Am I not a man and a brother":
https://www.diplomaticrooms.state.gov/objects/anti-slavery-medallion-am-i-not-a-man-and-a-brother-3/
The ancient world might well have agreed this person was a man, but a brother? Where did that notion come from? How is this man of another race my brother? In what sense can he claim a duty of family to him?
And that comes from principles like the Good Samaritan. It's important that it's a lawyer who poses the question "Who is my neighbour?" because it's a very lawyer-like query: give me a definition, back it up with evidence and precedent, delimit my duties and responsibilities exactly to exactly whom:
"25 And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” 26 He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” 27 And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” 28 And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”
29 But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
And the answer he is made to give, out of his own mouth, is:
"36 Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” 37 He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.”
The merciful man is my neighbour, and my mercy must extend to *everyone*.
That becomes a defining trait of Christianity; even Julian the Apostate complains about it as being how the Christians appeal to the pagan poor and lower classes, because they do what their own will not or do not do:
"22. To Arsacius, High-priest of Galatia [362, on his way to Antioch in June?]
The Hellenic religion does not yet prosper as I desire, and it is the fault of those who profess it; for the worship of the gods is on a splendid and magnificent scale, surpassing every prayer and every hope. May Adrasteia pardon my words, for indeed no one, a little while ago, would have ventured even to pray for a change of such a sort or so complete within so short a time. Why, then, do we think that this is enough, why do we not observe that it is their benevolence to strangers, their care for the graves of the dead and the pretended holiness of their lives that have done most to increase atheism? I believe that we ought really and truly to practise every one of these virtues. And it is not enough for you alone to practise them, but so must all the priests in Galatia, without exception. Either shame or persuade them into righteousness or else remove them from their priestly office, if they do not, together with their wives, children and servants, attend the worship of the gods but allow their servants or sons or wives to show impiety towards the gods and honour atheism more than piety. In the second place, admonish them that no priest may enter a theatre or drink in a tavern or control any craft or trade that is base and not respectable. Honour those who obey you, but those who disobey, expel from office. In every city establish frequent hostels in order that strangers may profit by our benevolence; I do not mean for our own people only, but for others also who are in need of money. I have but now made a plan by which you may be well provided for this; for I have given directions that 30,000 modii of corn shall be assigned every year for the whole of Galatia, and 60,000 pints of wine. I order that one-fifth of this be used for the poor who serve the priests, and the remainder be distributed by us to strangers and beggars. For it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galilaeans support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us. Teach those of the Hellenic faith to contribute to public service of this sort, and the Hellenic villages to offer their first fruits to the gods; and accustom those who love the Hellenic religion to these good works by teaching them that this was our practice of old. At any rate Homer makes Eumaeus say: "Stranger, it is not lawful for me, not even though a baser man than you should come, to dishonour a stranger. For from Zeus come all strangers and beggars. And a gift, though small, is precious." Then let us not, by allowing others to outdo us in good works, disgrace by such remissness, or rather, utterly abandon, the reverence due to the gods. If I hear that you are carrying out these orders I shall be filled with joy.
As for the government officials, do not interview them often at their homes, but write to them frequently. And when they enter the city no priest must go to meet them, but only meet them within the vestibule when they visit the temples of the gods. Let no soldier march before them into the temple, but any who will may follow them; for the moment that one of them passes over the threshold of the sacred precinct he becomes a private citizen. For you yourself, as you are aware, have authority over what is within, since this is the bidding of the divine ordinance. Those who obey it are in very truth god-fearing, while those who oppose it with arrogance are vainglorious and empty-headed.
I am ready to assist Pessinus if her people succeed in winning the favour of the Mother of the Gods. But, if they neglect her, they are not only not free from blame, but, not to speak harshly, let them beware of reaping my enmity also. "For it is not lawful for me to cherish or to pity men who are the enemies of the immortal gods." Therefore persuade them, if they claim my patronage, that the whole community must become suppliants of the Mother of the Gods."
The Jewish people look after their own poor and needy, the Christians look after everyone. This seems to be a new thing.
And so, down the centuries, this is taken as the lodestar: to be progressive, to be merciful, to be better than those who went before us is to be - what? To expand the circle of concern wider and wider. To give aid to the victims. To make victimhood, finally, as in the chief complaint about wokeism, the one badge of correctness and proof from all criticism. I am disadvantaged, you owe me but I owe nothing!
One of the virtues, gone wild. Charity. Made into an idol.
I agree.
What's your principled way of differentiating Girard from other thinkers like Foucault or Derrida who similarly pulled Big Transcendent Ideas out of their not-very-rigorous behinds? Not looking for an ideological fight here, just genuinely curious. Are you arguing that all such thinkers should have zero academic respectability, or is there something uniquely unrigorous about Girard?
Yup, all such thinkers should have zero academic respectability. Or, more accurately, should be placed in a seperate academic category for interesting speculation (at least Foucault). The problem isn't the ideas, it's that academia doesn't really have a category for things that lack methodological rigor so instead of Foucault just being like here are a bunch of thoughts I've had it gets dressed up and made harder to approach to satisfy some sense that academic content has to be hard to produce and then treated as if it was therefore had a substantial degree of justification or argument behind it.
Though Foucault is closer to just: here are some ideas than others .
I'm inclined to agree with you in spirit, but how do you do this in a sensible way? Do you throw out all of philosophy? If not, how do you decide who to keep?
The issue is the methodology not the claims at issue. What you do is you focus peer-review/academic acceptability on clarity and precision.
The issue isn't the ideas that any of these thinkers have. It's the obscurantist way they are presented and argued for. Modern analytic philosophy is incredibly broad in the kind of arguments it is willing to consider but it puts demands of clarity on them. You are supposed to spell out exactly what you mean and give clear definitions.
The problem with continental philosophy is the fact that it's work to figure out what is being claimed to the point that there are common debates arguments about about what is really meant. It's a neat trick that makes the reader feel they've gotten something of intellectual value because their brain got a work out and to see the work as more valuable because they read in their own ideas.
Besides, anytime people focus on whether X was claiming Y or Z rather than whether Y or Z is true suggests a problem unless you are doing literal history (and yes this is an issue in areas viewed as analytic philosophy too...part of why I didn't initially use the analytic/continental terminology)
That part is the basic pitch for analytic philosophy (tho see paren above) but I'd go much further and suggest that we move away from the book or article as the appropriate unit of contribution and towards the exchange (claims and rebutals). Rather than discouraging direct responses the assumption should be that for every article published they'll be several rebuttals and a back and forth.
If it's a good idea/argument then when there is a reply saying do you mean A or B here and dissecting each step will result in an improved argument.
I think what we know about human thought tells us that the more we demand specificity and careful pedantic steps the less likely we are to make errors (provided you publish rebutals ow there is danger you just get a library of the philosophical equivalent of those clever trick proofs 0=1).
Will it be as inspiring or pleasant to read for the layperson? No probably not but that's the reason we have specialists.
Scott, I think you might enjoy Opening the Heart of Compassion. It's the best English language treatment I know of the Buddhist psychological model and I think it makes some suggestive predictions about victim mindset. Be warned, the first third of the book is esoteric Tibetan Buddhism stuff. It also has a half a page long, nine step version of the therapy method that I found to be the best after trying about a dozen.
Does this have anything in common with the analogy Greg Lukianoff draws between Buddhist meditation and cognitive-behavioral therapy? (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/10/21/greg-lukianoff-cancel-culture-00121817)
> Finally, Lukianoff began cognitive behavioral therapy with Jonathan Kaplan, a psychologist who grounded his practice in Buddhism. Gradually, Lukianoff began to feel better. “I began to see my thoughts like the weather,” he says. This self-mastery again changed Lukianoff’s life.
Typo: "The oracle was right that Oedipus had killed his mother and married his father"
It was the other way around.
Thanks, fixed.
Modern family
Given that Laius, Oedipus' father,. was accused of being the first gay/paederast, that alternate version could work too:
"After the death of his father Labdacus, Laius was raised by the regent Lycus but Amphion and Zethus usurped the throne of Thebes. Some Thebans, wishing to see the line of Cadmus continue, smuggled the young Laius out of the city before their attack, in which they killed Lycus and took the throne. Laius was welcomed by Pelops, king of Pisa in the Peloponnesus. According to some sources, Laius abducted and raped the king's son, Chrysippus, and carried him off to Thebes while teaching him how to drive a chariot, or as Hyginus records it, during the Nemean Games. Because of this, Laius is considered by many to be the originator of pederastic love, and the first pederastic rapist."
Honestly, the Cadmeans are just slightly less fucked-up than the Atreides.
"We rewrote the age-old story of Oedipus for a modern audience"
Oedipus is now Oedipa, a spunky brave princess who sets out to find the secret behind her identity. Disguising herself as a man, Oedipus, she arrives in Thebes....
Oedipa: *kills mother*
Audience: "YASS SLAY QUEEN"
Oedipa: *marries father*
Audience: "Well that's a problematic age gap."
Ah, but! The Clever Twist!
Oedipa: *marries father, takes over ruling Thebes, relegates Dad to looking after the (grand)kids which we carefully gloss over how come there's babies now*
Audience: GIRLBOSS! STRONG INDEPENDENT WOMAN!
Then we can blame the plague etc. on The Patriarchy and a plot to ovethrow Oedipa because the fuddy-duddies can't stomach a Strong Independent Girlboss Queen and something something The Furies actually are on her side something something.
Remaking it for a Modern Audience 😁
>"Satan will descend to Earth in the form of Barak... insane right-wing conspiracy theorists"
The Obama years are such a distant memory now that my first reaction on reading this was to wonder what the right-wing conspiracy theorists have been saying about Ehud Barak.
Alex Jones was recently clear that he believes Obama is still running things.
Is it just me, or does step 4 in the single-victim process seem like a non sequitur? I don't see why killing the victim would mean that people "stop coveting their neighbors’ stuff quite so hard, at least for a while."
I'd say the explanation is people feel a sense of belonging and purpose by joining the mob and successfully kill the victim, so they sense equality and put aside the desire to be better/have more than the other
The sense of unity, that "we're all in this together" and of equality; me and my neighbour successfully drove out the element causing misfortune and evil, so we are on friendly and even familial terms now. We share what we have, or we share in the social aftermath. There's no envy (for a while, at least) to drive me to want their stuff or them to want mine.
Would someone mind getting me over the line regarding the opening reference to Obama being the antichrist? Is this Scott being tongue-in-cheek or is this an implication concluded in the book aka "something-something-woke-democrats?"
It's tongue-in-cheek. Scott is not saying Obama is the antichrist, and the author isn't saying it either.
Thanks, I was a bit unsure given the rest of the review.
Also, it's a bit of an inside joke. Obama was the Antichrist in Scott's novel Unsong.
I think this part specifically:
https://unsongbook.com/interlude-%D7%A9-obama/
Obama being the antichrist is an old meme from back when he was president. For whatever reason, there was a decent amount of rhetoric from the religious right comparing him to the antichrist, and according to some poll, 13% of people actually believed that he was the antichrist (another 13% said they were "unsure"). There were also a few cases where a heckler shouted at Obama that he was the antichrist (here's one such case: https://www.nbcnews.com/video/heckler-obama-you-are-anti-christ-312206403708 ).
What was really impressive to me was the significant proportion of 'maybe antichrist' people who also said they would vote for him
Even one of my friends in highschool thought he was the antichrist, or at least privately wondered aloud to me about it.
He was a black man who made them feel dumb by comparison, I figure is the main reason.
Typo: in bullet 2 of the enumeration: "individuals wants" should be "individual wants".
Or better "individual desires"?
Your review was very educational for me as, too, are many of the comments below. I have become an instant fan of your thinking and writing.
"It would help if Girard could come up with some specific way that wokeness went too far and became qualitatively different from the Christian imperative."
Christianity demands that elites imagine themselves as victims. Victims should also imagine themselves as elites. Both should imagine themselves as brothers. This is an extremely difficult ideal to uphold for both elites and victims. Everyone will fail at this ideal because everyone is broken, but everyone should try to reach this ideal because everyone is redeemable. Both halves of the ideal are important for continuing to make progress.
Wokeness demands that elites (really, the intelligentsia) imagine themselves as victims. It makes no demands on the victims. Neither the oppressors nor the victims are seen as redeemable, either because they're evil or because they're already justified. The result is half a flywheel that spins out of control.
Even worse, it imagines no agency on the part of victims. The victims will always be victims and virtuous as a result.
When someone classified as a victim proves this wrong by having agency, he or she is thereby reclassified not just as an oppressor, but as a heretic. The resulting mob mentality is worse as a result.
Where can I find this argued convincingly with examples?
Has someone argued this convincingly somewhere? Ideally not hysterically.
Could you elaborate on the question and which part you want to see argued convincingly?
Ah, yeah that's not clear. That "neither the oppressors nor the victims are seen as redeemable" is a fair characterization of the essence of wokeness, and not just of the mob-dynamics of movements. That Christianity meaningfully circumvented this, at least at times, rather than just professing to circumvent it.
Really I'm just interested in this kind of analysis, identifying moral undercurrents in religion and modern social movements, but deeply tired of all the hysteria and rationalized venting-of-grievances, I really want to read someone who has made sense of it all *fairly*, and is able to speak to the good and failures of wokeness, and can distinguish the emotional heart of the movement from the kinds of spirals of unaccountable mob behavior that tend to occur when a movement's capacity for action is curbed (by its own inability to control itself, likely!)—without giving into the various excesses towards either side that seem to be unavoidable on this topic.
Thank you! Hopefully someone comes along and gives some recommendations; for now, I'll take a vague stab at it. There's a good chance I'll still fall into those excesses at times.
I have yet to find a convincing argument *why* the accumulated theorizing of wokeness kind of took over and common-sense liberalism seems defenseless, though. If you're looking for that- good luck.
>I really want to read someone who has made sense of it all *fairly*
It's something I've found irritating for quite a while as well, that there's no great treatment of and too many pitfalls. Right-wingers are too polemical, centrists end up doing too much throat-clearing to not sound like right-wingers.
>is able to speak to the good... of wokeness
Frankly, here's one of the pitfalls, I'm not sure there is. To specify, I think wokeness is a mob-dynamic accumulation of different academic theories that are intended to address real and considerable problems, but go about it in ways so wrong all of the theorizing is useless. At best wokeness is useful to identify problems, but as of yet produced no solutions and many failures. I think this may be an inherent problem as an outgrowth of postmodern deconstructionism- it's a field of thought that is incapable of positive development.
There are a few circumstances where you literally fight fire with fire. Trying to fight racism with more racism, forever, or fight sexism with more sexism, is just lighting fires for the fun of it and you don't really care what happens.
>"neither the oppressors nor the victims are seen as redeemable" is a fair characterization of the essence of wokeness, and not just of the mob-dynamics of movements.
Agreed about the nature of this being a mob dynamic. My position is that the danger of the mob dynamic is descended from many years of academic theorizing being applied (semi-) literally in ways that they *probably* weren't intended to be taken literally. The thought that's been in my head lately is "intersectionality is a koan," and trying to apply a koan literally is often foolish or dangerous.
The phrasing could've been better and while I don't have a good essay or book to recommend, there's a lot of stuff I'd gesture at.
Oppressor/oppressed is an incredibly potent method of othering and developing tribal instincts, and once combined with the identity-group theorizing that accumulated to form wokeness, it can be used to justify nearly anything.
On the "irredeemable oppressor" side, I would point at everyone who has ever used the word "whiteness" unironically. Robin Diangelo, Tema Okun, Donald Moss, Tommy Curry- as just a handful of writers, of varying degrees of popularity, playing a shell game of what "whiteness" means and that it's something people can never truly recover from. I might go as far as hailing back to Frantz Fanon and the whole field of decolonialism.
On the "oppressed don't need redeemed" side, I'd point at things like... well, Hamas apologists and "what do you think decolonization meant?" Or Canadian laws about lesser sentences for non-white criminals, various US DAs implementing similar policies, the weird tensions generated between policies like softer sentences for actual rapists but more social sanctions for asking someone out the wrong way. I think it's inherent to the philosophy that the oppressed are virtually without agency; whatever they do is in reaction to those oppressing them and justified by virtue of being oppressed.
>That Christianity meaningfully circumvented this, at least at times, rather than just professing to circumvent it.
I would phrase it slightly differently: Chrisianity at least provides the *theory* of circumventing it, whereas the theories that accumulated to form "wokeness" do not.
Most notably, in Paul's letter to the Galatians, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." The intention is to rise above other identity markers like race and sex. Wokeness takes the opposite approach of solidifying those identity markers as permanent (and unscalable?) separations between people.
Likewise, Romans 3:23-24, "since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus... ." It is a state shared by all of humanity, and all of humanity is (potentially, but let's not get too theologically digressed) redeemed in Christ.
The oppressor/oppressed dynamic does not provide a path of redemption, at least in part because they are systemic: you as an individual cannot change your status (maybe you can find a new axis on which you're oppressed and take advantage of that), no one else can change your status, at best you can try to minimize your harms and abdicate as much of your undeserved power as possible.
That was a lot and thanks to Substack's lack of formatting, not terribly well-organized. But I can try to elaborate if any of it interests you.
Oh, I think you are committing one of the fallacies of "analyzing wokeness" which I am trying to find a treatment that avoids—
I am quite certain it is not an *intellectual* movement. Misunderstanding it to BE one leads to, of course, viewing it as a bad one. But: "Mob-dynamic accumulation of different academic theories that are intended to address real and considerable problems" is wrong. There is a crit-theory *backing* for things, and it comes up, but I am quite sure (as a sympathizer) that the essence of the movement is an enormous body of *anecdotes*, known to all.
It's akin to how we all generally know "the U.S. healthcare system is deeply fucked up" without necessarily knowing a single piece of hard evidence why—hearing 10000 stories of how people have fallen through the cracks, or e.g. end-stage dialysis providers have abused patients to exploit an Obamacare loophole, has the cumulative effect of indicting the entire system in one's mental model to the point where it is irredeemable. Just a few data points, or a few personal experiences, points to a 'flawed subsystem'. But at some point the negative data is so plentiful—and corroborated by personal experience, e.g. I have never had a good time interacting the medical system except for a single boutique PCP—that all those subsystems failures "backpropagate" to indict the whole thing.
Returning to wokeness—it is very necessary to distinguish the "emotional engine" of it, this anecdote, from the *argument* used to intellectualize it on the plane of discourse. At best these are reasonably sound crit-theory, but the core emotional posture is literally unable to participate in rational discourse, so great is the pain every single true believer is feeling—this shows up as a *refusal* to, sometimes, or a pitiable attempt to, but in either case these are not fallacies of the movement but evidence for *how much hopeless pain these people are feeling*—not, I think, unjustifiably; the human mind is not designed for exposure to so much bad news.
> produced no solutions and many failures
The state of intense and hopeless pain is begging for someone else to produce solutions. It cannot. All it can do is hate the thing which it has come to believe is the source of the pain.
> Oppressor/oppressed is an incredibly potent method of othering and developing tribal instincts, and once combined with the identity-group theorizing that accumulated to form wokeness, it can be used to justify nearly anything.
Yeah, I guess I agree with all this. But I think of this as a post-hoc rationalization of the mob dynamics (of course, re-used to fire up more mobs, and wielded mercilessly by teenagers online).
All your examples are good. I am so numb to this stuff I stopped remembering them/taking them seriously. "What did you think colonization meant" is of course egregious, but... isn't that just kids (maybe 20-some, but basically kids) online, saying nonsense? How seriously is that taken? Plenty of horrible stuff being said on both sides. Always has been, see e.g. nutjob Iraq war apologism.
> I would phrase it slightly differently: Chrisianity at least provides the *theory* of circumventing it, whereas the theories that accumulated to form "wokeness" do not.
I see what you mean. I tend to think of Christianity-the-religion as a tremendous motte-and-bailey, with this stuff the motte (er, the inner one), and even Bible itself as a book that says some nice stuff but is not ... magic enough... to pull off what it tries to do. Is a movement that offers a good theory but fails to realize it almost all of the time any better than one that doesn't offer a good theory at all?
Great answer, anyway, thank you. Clarifying my thoughts on this.
> speak to the good... of wokeness
What I sense as "the good"—am I going to have to write this essay myself?—is not in the claims or language of wokeness, but in that emotional heart, which amounts to a tremendous weight of evidence against a lot of rigidly-held beliefs of modernity, and demands that they by uprooted and changed. This is basically good, because our society is in fact very oppressive. But it is not possible for a society to act on the "revolutionary change" emotion alone, you *need* a synthesis with a conservative voice to produce any changes that can be trusted. The emotion behind wokeness ought to supply the *energy* that motivates less-hysterical people to work around-the-clock to change the world.
I *suspect* it's a fallacy, anyway, that's my point.
Want to add that I think very much of our current era as the end of a second "Gilded Age", which also fomented a great deal of revolutionary socialism, which had to be diffused by the creation of the whole Progressive Era state administration (not, of course, without its many flaws.) New Deal is similar. In both cases many more-radical positions were adopted by the centrist coalition, both to diffuse radicals and just for the good of it. But centrists have to establish sounder principles for action (hence New Deal welfare being argued on a liberal-rights basis instead of a strict populist-entitlement basis.)
DeBoer might be the best source that I can think of for that particular prescription, if you can get past his glaring flaws as a writer.
"Half a flywheel" forms a drivable mechanical oscillator, and is used to generate vibration / haptic feedback in eg phones, game controllers (any metaphorical significance is left to the reader)
The thing about "concern for (mimetically invented) victims" is this..... its great popularity comes from the nice narcissistic feeling it gives wonderful little YOU - the woke person - about YOURSELF. And the best thing of all is that it costs you nothing.
> Cancellers never kill anybody, just drive them off Twitter for a while; usually they’re back after six months. Cancellers certainly don’t deify their victims afterwards. And none of this temporarily rejuvenates society; people are just as happy to cancel another celebrity the day after cancelling the first one.
The Cancel Culture most people fear is about a much more intimate and personal mobbing and shunning, much closer to the Scapegoat and the Ostracism.
It's about much *smaller players* being expelled from social circles, about gigs and contracts drying up, about attacks on their business or professional life, or that of partners, and all usually for the sin of holding very mainstream views or having very normal reactions to the events around them.
(These views and reactions aren't necessarily "on the right side of history", but usually common enough that if cancellers were being consistent, there would be very few businesses they could buy from, and not a lot of art or entertainment they could consume.)
I tend to think of Cancel Culture as a form of economic terrorism. However, in light of Scott's review, I wonder if there's something more primal at work: groups affirm their collective luxury or radical beliefs by projecting their individual secret doubts onto the victim, who then takes them off into the wilderness. Catharsis is achieved. Social peace is restored. Until the next time.
If a cancelled person gets killed by being attacked by a mob, is it the mob, or the cancellation?
I feel from a legal perspective it's certainly the mob that would be charged. (or more specifically it's component individuals.)
Re-reading, I didn't verb the sentence. Bad grammar! No cookie!
I was not however talking about a court case. I was talking who is at fault morally. From my point of view, it's both.
In Rwanda, there was a radio announcer (I forget his name) calling for Hutu to kill Tutsi. Was he morally responsible? Yes. Were the machete-wielders responsible? Yes.
Different scopes, different kinds of responsibility.
In the developed world we have to worry about a concept that people on the Left used to talk about a lot, but have strangely gone silent on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism
> Stochastic terrorism refers to political or media figures publicly demonizing a person or group in such a way that it inspires supporters of the figures to commit a violent act against the target of the speech. Unlike incitement to terrorism, this is accomplished by using indirect, vague, or coded language that allows the instigator to plausibly disclaim responsibility for the resulting violence. Global trends point to increasing violent rhetoric and political violence, including more evidence of stochastic terrorism.
I imagine this is what keeps JK Rowling's security detail up at night.
If that's the "Cancel Culture" people are afraid of, then I don't know why they only started complaining now, considering that it's older than the United States itself. Jamelle Bouie actually wrote a great opinion piece on this: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/12/opinion/cancel-culture-tocqueville.html
> Under the absolute government of one alone, despotism struck the body crudely, so as to reach the soul; and the soul, escaping from those blows, rose gloriously above it; but in democratic republics, tyranny does not proceed in this way; it leaves the body and goes straight for the soul. The master no longer says to it: You shall think as I do or you shall die; he says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your goods, everything remains to you; but from this day on, you are a stranger among us. You shall keep your privileges in the city, but they will become useless to you; for if you crave the vote of your fellow citizens, they will not grant it to you, and if you demand only their esteem, they will still pretend to refuse it to you. You shall remain among men, but you shall lose your rights of humanity. When you approach those like you, they shall flee you as being impure; and those who believe in your innocence, even they shall abandon you, for one would flee them in turn. Go in peace, I leave you your life, but I leave it to you worse than death.
...This was written in 1835.
I mean, "people shunning other people" is a mechanism as old as humanity itself. The question is that the traditionally "modern" viewpoint is that this is bad, because it was usually used to enforce oppressive traditional morality. The village's old wives shunning the woman who dared being a bit less sexually repressed and such. Consider how much our pop art celebrates the outcast who runs against the grain and are able to stand their own even when no one believes in them, and are eventually proven right. The novelty here is instead people with progressive values (so very much anti traditional morality) looking at this tool like Boromir looks at the One Ring and asking "Why not use this ring?".
But of course, the hearts of men are easily corrupted. And the ring of power has a will of its own.
Yes, I think that the difference is that in Cancel Culture the victims are often people with mainstream views and/or just operating in the mainstream world.
That means that just everybody is potentially guilty of some terrible transgression against social justice... which seems jolly convenient for the self-appointed inquisitors and their salems.
That's not quite my point; yes, it is true that sometimes people on the left get outraged at people having overall relatively *centrist* opinions in the Overton window simply because they are to the right of them, and thus try to cancel them. But since cancelling is based on social shame, by definition, the smaller the quantile of people far off from the idea to be outraged, the lower its power. In fact this is in part also a feature of cancel culture: it acts as if it was a vastly majoritarian view but it's not, and so at best it creates polarization, not suppression of ideas (and then uses this ineffectiveness to claim it doesn't really do anything at all).
But my point was more that there is NO actual good way to harness the power of self-righteous crowds whipped to a frenzy to enact mob justice. Self-righteous crowds are just bad. They're not bad based on their goals, they're bad because they can't be controlled and whatever their starting goals they always manage to warp them into some dumb oversimplified thing that becomes merely a rationalization to feed their lust for validation. Never summon that which you cannot control, and you cannot control self-righteous crowds. Eventually the monster escapes your control and eats you too, every single time.
Hmm.
To the first: The condemned opinions aren't usually centrist, they're just normie, e.g. "looting is bad/bad for the cause you're rioting for". And though the cancel mobs are a minority, they dominate the arts and higher education, often in non-productive roles... and can do actual economic damage to people pursuing vocations
To the second: I just don't know. It would be nice to be able to rule out crowd social/professional justice on general principle. However, doesn't it have some utility where an individual is a pest in some manner? "Don't work with X, he can't keep his hands to himself."
I meant "centrist" in the sense of in the middle of the Overton window, so yeah, pretty normie was my meaning.
I think some amount of that sort of "gossiping" within closed circles of people can be useful - though it can also go awry, and in general it's always good to keep things up to a decent standard of evidence rather than just "someone told me". It's a dangerous game to play though; I'd still say it's much better to e.g. simply have a good HR department in place that can conduct a proper investigation. But the problem is also doing it through the internet, when people have approximately zero chance to examine context or sometimes straight up know anything about what they're talking about. And this also holds for accusations that would be serious if true; when we're talking about silly stuff like as you say holding completely average opinions such as "looting is bad" or "the police is good, actually", then yeah, it's just straight up insane. Not to say that for example you can't criticize the police or that it can't be fully deserved; what's absurd is to expect everyone else to think the police is just overall bad as a matter of fact and call ignorant or fascist anyone who disagree.
I do believe you're onto something.
Everyone has seen minor cases of "cancelling" in close-knit groups. Everyone "suddenly" decides that Person X is Bad and Must Go.
This is nothing new. For example, TERFs will tell you stories of venues accidentally double booked, and regular gigs mysteriously drying up. It's not about people sending r*pe threats to JKR, it's about smaller players like Sophie Distras getting booted from platforms.
"They are bad, we are separate from them, therefore we are good."
This is quite insightful!
> groups affirm their collective luxury or radical beliefs by projecting their individual secret doubts onto the victim
This describes the Cancellation of Larry Summers and James Damore perfectly. The luxury belief is that the two genders both equally love obsessing over building machines. Of course anyone's common sense disagrees, and indeed Harvard admission's dept and Google recruitment dept both have loads of empirical evidence siding with commonsense. But the one who "Notices" - even with the most gentle anecdotes or objective analysis -must be denounced and destroyed by the mob. Gender equality restored :)
It does suggest that this isn't going to go away until the institutions go away, or are thoroughly reformed. On weakness the UK has is that we have a vast charitable sector, with lots of public work outsourced to non-profits.
Never mind Nietzsche, Tim Rice summed it up nicely in the words of woke Judas:
"My God I saw him, he looked three quarters dead
And he was so bad I had to turn my head
You beat him so hard that he was bent and lame
And I know who everybody's gonna blame
I dont believe he knows I acted for our good
I'd save him all the suffering if I could
Dont believe our good / save him if I could
PRIEST NO. 3:
Cut the confessions, forget the excuses, I don't understand why you're filled with remorse
All that you've said has come true with a vengeance, the mob turned against him, you backed the right horse
CAIAPHAS:
What you have done will be the saving of Israel, you'll be remembered forever for this
And not only that, you've been paid for your efforts - pretty good wages for one little kiss
JUDAS:
Christ I know you can't hear me, but i only did what you wanted me to
Christ I'd sell out the nation for i have been saddled with the murder of you
...etc etc, then he dramatically hangs himself
Regarding cancel culture, thinking of it in terms of the suffering of the victim seems like a bit of a strawman (tho ironically appropriate here). That's like saying that the medevil catholic church's attempts to clamp down on scientific discoveries were horrible because they made the heretics unhappy. Sure, no one wants to be punished but one could reasonably counter that the ideas the heretics raised could easily make many other people feel unhappy/worried/etc and maybe the balance falls in favor of punishing heresy especially if you leave out the burning alive parts.
The better argument has always revolved around the costs if you end up using social pressure to prevent the acceptance of valuable correct ideas.
Hi, not commenting about the text per se here.
Just read the first three sentences and told myself "damn, seems really interesting, would love to be able to read the entire text, on paper, when I chill at home".
Could it make sense to have some sort of paper version of the 100 best articles from Astral Codex Ten?
That's a thing I would buy and read for sure.
Love the work.
Best
Baptiste
There are a few compilations of Scott's work in print format:
https://www.amazon.com/Slate-Star-Codex-Essays-I/dp/1735797103
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WFmDFQJp27Fb7nxmF/print-books-of-scott-alexander-s-writing
Hi Timothy,
Never took the time to reply, sorry.
Many thanks for your help, I've bought the three amazon prints.
Baptiste
Been a long time since I read Oedipus, but I'm pretty sure the oracle blamed the plague on the former king's murderer still being unpunished; the prophecy of killing his father and marrying his mother was specifically given to Oedipus and his parents at his birth, and he thought he'd beaten it by leaving home.
The prophecy was given to his parents and they therefore abandoned him to die in the mountains as a baby with his feet pierced. He was adopted by a shepherd. As in many of these stories the irony is that by trying to escape the prophecy his parents helped it come to pass (that is, he would not have married his mother if he had known her as a child).
Thought he also got it himself, which was why he left his adoptive parents.
I guess he got it later separately.
Just every oracle in Greece sees Oedipus and is like "THAT'S a guy who's gonna kill his father and marry his mother."
"Yeah you're like, famous in the oracle community. Can I have an autograph?"
"Why? Uh, I can't answer yet that because ... of paradox. Yeah."
If we are going to talk about liberal legal processes as the alternative to scapegoating, I think Athenian tragedy may be relevant. Euripides, in particular, shows Orestes being driven mad by the Furies after he has killed his mother and her lover to avenge their murder of his father; but the Furies are turned away by Athena setting up a court where Orestes can be tried and aquitted. That particular mythic account antedates Christianity by several centuries.
I would also suggest that Nietzsche's criticism of slave morality should not be taken as a simple advocacy of master morality. Nietzsche has critical things to say about master morality as well. And very importantly, he argued that the "faith in opposite values" was a fundamental mistake in ethical thinking—and "Nietzsche criticized slave morality and therefore must have advocated master morality" seems like a classic manifestation of that faith.
I wonder if Girard made any commentary in the book about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.
The difference between Christian morality and woke social justice is that Christianity is primarily about the Christian’s achieving salvation, faith, grace, sainthood and secondarily about concern for social justice.
A Christian community sees its Christianity as vital for its members, so it has to be wary about the influence of the outside world. And sees itself as better in at least some way than the non Christian community. The Christian community believes it has the higher ideals that people should submit to, although it falls short of them.
“Wokeness” however assumes that the “Other” is somehow wonderful and special and that “we” are committing some primordial sin by “othering” the outsider. (This explains why woke leftists are so sympathetic to Islamists).
In my experience woke types absolutely mistrust the outside world. That's what all the social media censorship and fretting about Good Representation and safe spaces are for. Did you ever read the SCC post "I can tolerate anything except the outgroup?" Just because a group claims to like the "other" doesn't mean they actually do, the most other you can be to a woke American is a conservative American. They do have lofty ideals they want us all to be striving for, but feel everyone falls short on, for example: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Yes, but the conservative American isn’t an outsider to America. The woke American takes what they see as most traditional to their country and rejects that.
DEI are values but they aren’t the values of a society, they are a statement that societies should be as porous as possible. Of course in practice they can function to create ideological homogeneity in institutions but that isn’t their ostensible purpose.
I was moderately shocked some years ago when I found out that Tyler Cowen counted Girard as one of the great thinkers of the 20th century. Yes, I was aware of the fact that Girard had acquired somewhat of a following outside the academy, I'd even cruised on by a Girardian website or two, but Tyler Cowen? I'm not a Cowenite by any means, but I think he's a smart guy with interesting things to say. He's also an empirical social scientist by training and Girard is, well, I guess he's (Continental) philosopher write very large. A completely different kind of thinker.
Is Cowen following, deferring to, Peter Thiel on this? I don't know.
Anyhow, I gave Girard a serious go some years ago, and then pretty much forgot about him. Dick Macksey brought him in as a guest lecturer in one or two of the five-I-believe-it-was courses I'd taken with him, certainly the course on the autobiographical novel, perhaps the course on the theater as well. Anyhow Girard lectured on mimetic desire and sacrifice and I found it pretty interesting, even compelling. When the English translation Violence and the Sacred came out I read it, marked it up extensively, and then pretty much forgot about Girard. Why? Because by that time my interest in literature had taken me to, of all places, the cognitive sciences in general, and computational semantics in particular. That's a conceptual world that's very different from Girard. No, I liked Lévi-Strauss on myth, the way he analyzed him more than his sometimes puzzling, if not silly, meta-commentary on it all. I saw a line from Lévi-Strauss to cognitive science (& an AI researcher, Sheldon Klein, did a simulation of his myth model back in the late-1970s), so I went there. From Girard, not quite nothing.
For those basic stories of mimesis and sacrifice have stuck with me, so much so that a couple of years ago I used them in an analysis of Steven Spielberg's Jaws, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/02/shark-city-sacrifice-a-girardian-reading-of-steven-spielbergs-jaws.html. The model seemed to work there, and I have no doubt that it works in other cases as well. But as a theory of everything? Really? You believe in those, theories of every-damn-thing, do you?
Anyhow, if you've a taste for it, Stanford comp. lit. professor Josh Landy has written a nice critique of Girard and his followers: Deceit, Desire, and the Literature Professor: Why Girardians Exist, https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/deceit-desire-and-literature-professor-why-girardians-exist. Here's a paragraph picked more or less at random:
"Is it really true that all violence is a by-product of mimetic rivalry? Here’s the kind of situation Girard is asking us to imagine. Two men, Jimmy and Joey, stand beside a lake on a hot day. Jimmy decides to go for a swim. Joey, who would never have had this idea in his life, immediately decides to do likewise. Inevitably, this causes a death struggle between the two men as they fight over the lake."
Whoops!
As someone who has read MR pretty religiously for more than 10 years now, I am of the opinion that Tyler is not above a certain degree of pretentious-ness.
As perhaps epitomized by his innumerable references to "Straussian reading." It mystified me at first, as it has many. I assumed he meant Leo Strauss, whom I've not read. The problem is that I'm from a literary background. When I see someone refer to an "Xian reading" of this or that, I expect to see themes typical of X. A Freudian reading is one thing, a Marxist reading is something else, then we have feminist readings and so on through a whole list. If someone does a Girardian reading, I expect to read about mimetic desire and sacrifice. Why? Because those are Girard's central themes.
But I never could find any particular themes in Cowen's Straussian readings. I finally decided that, since Strauss had argued that many ancient authors cloaked their true beliefs in verbal mystery as a way to dodge censorship, Cowen uses the term where I would simply talk of an interpretation or a reading. In Cowen's usage, then, there is no particular kind of reading that is Straussian in the sense that it is based in Strauss's ideas. It's just a somewhat, yes, pretentious (virtue signalling?) way of saying he's going to interpret the text.
"Straussian reading" seems to be a discrets concept in itself used ubiquitously in some field in some era (late-20thc poli theory?) but not commonly known beyond that.
Right. It does belong to a specific intellectual culture. But, in Cowen's use, the phrase does not seem to indicate a specific kind of reading. It just seems to me that all is not how things appear on the surfece.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/01/ask-the-beast.html
Thanks.
Which is to say that it has no content beyond what a literary critic or a philosopher means by talking about "interpretation" or "reading," except that he's implying a different intellectual community.
A "Straussian reading" is a polsci term. It means reading politically-charged texts as products of the ideological constraints of their times. I.e. if it would be political suicide (or just damaging) for someone to express certain opinions openly due to the prevailing opinions of their times, it can still be inferred that they held that position or opinion by reading from their choices of omissions or seeking veiled arguments.
And yes, it comes from Leo Strauss.
Cowen, however, does not seem to use it in the sense that Strauss would. He seems to use it simply to mean "a close reading that goes beyond the surface", which does strike me as a bit pretentious.
As far as Economists go Cowen isn't that Empirical. This isn't to say that he lacks technical skills or anything, but if you read his columns and posts he comes to his positions by arguing from first principles, not by starting from the data. He also has a fondness for looking at a deeper, potentially hidden, meaning (i.e. his whole 'Straussian' thing), in that sense you can see why he'd like Girard.
I fear that books like this (ie books that might be called continental philosophy by the non-specialist) exploit a number of weaknesses in the way academia works and in our reasoning systems to be taken more seriously than is epistemicly supported by the arguments they make. While I raised this as a problem in a different comment it's worth exploring how they manage this hack (no doubt unintentionally).
And yes I know that an immediate reaction will be -- just another STEM person dissing work they can't understand (though I do have the equivalent of a masters in philosophy) but it's exactly that reaction which is why I think it's important to push on this point.
Sometimes books in this style can be quite aesthetically enjoyable and pleasant to read (and if not they offer a feeling of accomplishment) . And they may contain interesting ideas or suggestions -- indeed often ones which, because of their vague or hard to quantify nature aren't well represented in the academic literature (tho maybe look more to Foucault than Girad). But that's the first part of the problem.
If you like such a book, even if you aren't convinced by it's argument, you immediately face a dillema. If you call it what it is -- the literary equivalent of a TED talk (an interesting idea wrapped in a snazzy often somewhat misleading presentation) you're effectively discarding it because it's too heavy to be read for fun and there isn't a category we recognize in academia for fun wild speculation without substantial backup. In turn the complexity of the work is necessary to meet the gatekeeping needs of academia (showing you've paid your dues by mastering some complex body of work).
Where the system for evaluating worth really gets hacked, however, is in the use of hard to interpret arguments and obscure points. Sometimes via hard to follow prose but equally possible with breezy deceptively easy to follow prose that isn't easily fit into a declarative argument. This has two effects -- it ensures that people who dislike the book are disinclined to really dig into it and invites the reader who does continue to really invest themselves into it by working out their own interpretation and understanding. The resulting mental workout is easily confused with intellectual value (the same way you might think you must have been productive today because your physically tired) and we now have -- to an extent -- read in our own ideas which we all have special love for.
We've now perfectly set the stage for the last aspect -- the discrediting of the critic. Anyone who doesn't buy into the books value won't have the same detailed theory of the work so can simply be dismissed as not having really understood the work. And this flips the normal criteria of worth in which a work is less valuable the harder it is to understand on its head. Sure, some other experts in the area may attack the work with authority but those are the attacks that legitimize it as being of real epistemic value not those that call it's value as scholarship into question. Or more preciscely, since it is almost definitionally scholarship, it's epistemic value.
Ultimately, then the problem is that the incentives strongly favor even the academics who don't find the style of arguments or methodology at all epistemicly reliable to pretend the work is of value to avoid both creating enemies/drama and especially to avoid the smear that they are the kind of unsophisticated STEM person who just can't appreciate this work.
Also pushing on this point risks raising hard questions about how we value various aspects of academic practice which makes it very hard to put together a coalition around the point (the guy who does Plato scholarship has to expect they are next).
> "[Girard] has to support something like 'increasing concern with helping victims was good until about 1950, and then went too far and became bad'. This is [....] less elegant than his other claims, and he never really says it outright."
> "[Does Girard have anything to say about] things like affirmative action laws, anti-free-speech policies, journals refusing to publish politically incorrect scientific results, or colleges forcing students to take diversity classes"?
I'm not claiming people haven't been unfairly victimized after 1950, but I think there is certainly an elegant theory for Girard to be had here, according to which ever-increasing concern (starting at zero, when Christianity was introduced) with helping unfairly victimized people not only becomes bad but leads to these other things. Namely, once the concern reaches the threshold where it is strong enough to keep unfair victimization in check, further increase requires distorting reality, to support the false but necessary claim that unfair victimization is still unchecked.
Christians have been clear for a long time that too much of one virtue inevitability leads to a vice. In the words of CS Lewis:
“The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers when there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under.”
There is more to the gospel than just “don’t blame victims”, as Scott makes clear, mythology has many more stories than this. The Bible reads to me a lot like a picture by MC Escher, inverting a bunch of common intuition to sell you on a God that is patient, loving, forgiving and kind, instead of terrifying and powerful. He wants us to be humble and patient and brave and loving, not prideful and desirous and fearful and selfish. Those are hard things to do, so hard that focusing on other people’s bad behavior is usually not helpful. I think the right response to wokism is to have faith, be patient, acknowledge the good in the movement and instead of complaint or fearing, just be better exemplars of virtue ourselves and trust in the deep structure of reality to cause delusions to work themselves out. The wokest places suffer wokism a lot more than less work places. Nothing produces as many conservatives as when liberals get an uncontested hold on power, and vice versa!
Take it from chapter 18 of the Tao Te Ching:
"When the great Dao is in decline,
Benevolence and loyalty appear.
As wisdom arises, so does hypocrisy.
Only in a feuding family do filial piety and parental doting become conspicuous.
Loyal ministers emerge whenever the country is in chaos."
Anyone with multiple children knows Girard is deserving a real thing as if it were universal. Man, life would be so much easier if that were so!
Hey kids, want to go to the park?
Older kid: yes!
Younger kid: No!
Hey kids, want to have Pho for dinner?
Older kid: yes!
Younger kid: no!
Hey kids, want to play this game with me?
Older kid: no!
Younger kid: yes!
Isn't there a difference, though?
"Which of these two toys do you want?" "Which slice of cake do you want?"
I think it's about competition: in your examples, they're competing to have their policy preference enacted, but in mine, they're competing for existing resources.
The Biblical narrative suggests that to be spiritually elite is to suffer more than others. There is a consistent pattern of reform starting at the center and moving outward. This is the role of the prophets or the nation of Israel as a “kingdom of priests” or, in the New Testament, Jesus and the church. God’s saving action begins often with a single person and then with a single group and spreads. But the person or group that is chosen for this role bears the brunt of the world’s resistance and suffers the most. As for wokeness, one could cite many examples of its excesses. A big one is the way that it excuses victims from moral responsibility which has the effect of retarding moral development thereby setting the victim up for further travails as an irresponsible, immoral person. But that’s what happens any time you elevate a single virtue as the master virtue which trumps all others. Christianity has historically blended various virtues and held them in tension. Wokeness simplifies thought with its single imperative and ends up doing injustice in the name of justice.
This was delightful to read! I read Unsong only recently and already miss it, and it was great to start the morning with some of that humor and wit :)
Apologies if I'm missing the joke and you actually did know, but the man who fell of the horse is a depiction of the epiphany of St. Paul — the moment when the tyrannical Roman army officer falls off his horse, has a luminous vision of the Messiah in the sky, and spontaneously becomes a posthumous apostle.
Came here to post this ^^. Ctrl-f
'Saul' turned up no hits and for a moment my faith in the commentariat wavered.
Back in the ’60s, Girard extrapolated the concept of mimetic desire from literature, and used it to explain things like why Sancho Panza was so faithful. He insisted, in his criticism (IIRC) that mimetic desire was not some universal truth but just a way to understand certain problems and motivations.
As time marched on, mimetic desire became, for Girard, more and more of a universal truth. He also assembled and published a lot of backing evidence about the mythology (Violence and the Sacred; The Scapegoat; Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World) involved.
But I See Satan Fall like Lightning is a late-period attempt to synthesize and explain for a popular audience things that Girard is more persuasive about if you let him rumble up to them in hundreds of academic pages. I’m not saying Girard’s theory isn’t crazy (I always think of him as a kind of mad scientist, but a mad *social scientist*) necessarily, just that he works harder to drag more myths than just Oedipus & Apollonius into his schema.
It’s been a long time since I’ve read Girard (except ISSFLL, which I read only a couple years ago), and I’ve hardly gone through all of it, so I’m not in a position to defend him. But I’d certainly suggest that if you read more Girard you’ll find Girard does a better job of defending himself.
So, like, Scott should review more of his books.
There is an interesting passage in 2nd Kings: When the king of Moab saw that the battle was going against him, he took with him 700 swordsmen to break through, opposite the king of Edom, but they could not. Then he took his oldest son who was to reign in his place and offered him for a burnt offering on the wall. And there came great wrath against Israel. And they withdrew from him and returned to their own land.
What makes this interesting is that surely this is an inconvenient story for the writer. He stays vague about what is the real power at work here. When I read this as an adult, I was struck by how ingrained into the psyche of Old Testament writers was the power of child sacrifice.
Where in the world does this come from? To me that’s the more interesting question at stake in your review. More so than the apologetics issue of whether Christianity uniquely fixes it such a way that we can now live in societies with hospitals, social security, and microchips. Maybe it is connected to the broader framework of mob violence, as the author suggests. But I’d really like more of an anthropological explanation than a wild chain following from mimicry.
That sacrifice is not just any child, it's the king's first-born son and his heir. So it's an all-or-nothing gambit; if the god of the Moab king doesn't help him win the battle, he's completely lost anyway and there isn't even the hope that his heir will continue the fight. It's giving the best and most valuable thing you have as a sacrifice.
I only looked this up now, and interpretations seem to be very variable from "the Israelites were so horrified by this deed that they retreated" (doesn't seem plausible); "the allies of the Israelites were disgusted and withdrew, abandoning them" (maybe); "the Moabites were so inspired by this that they fought even better and drove off the Israelites" (could be).
The king of Moab seemed to be in no doubt that it was due to Chemosh, their god, that the victory was won:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemosh
"Mesha soon rebelled against Israelite suzerainty and embarked on an expansionist policy against the Israelites, which he carried out as holy war performed as a ritual to Chemosh. After Mesha had captured the Gadite city of Ataroth (ʿAṭārōt), he slaughtered all of its inhabitants as an accomplishment of a vow he had made to Chemosh and to the population of Moab, and he brought the warden of Ataroth, the Gadite chief Uriel, to Kirioth, where Mesha sacrificed him to Chemosh. When, following his capture of Ataroth, Mesha conquered the town of Nebo, he sacrificed the whole Israelite population of the town to ʿAštar-Chemosh, likely because of ʿAštar's function as an avenger deity who was invoked in curses against enemies, and he brought all the lambs of the sanctuary of Yahweh, at Nebo to the sanctuary of Chemosh, where he sacrificed them to Chemosh.
Mesha recorded in his victory stela that he had built a high place dedicated to Chemosh in the citadel of the Moabite capital of Ḏaybān to thank the god for assuring his triumph in his military campaign against the Israelites."
The vagueness probably is due to the inconvenience of the story for the writer; the allied forces were driven back when they tried to put down the rebellion, how could this be, when the prophet Elisha had promised them victory? The answer is that the magical power of such a horrific sacrifice to the rival and demonic god (temporarily) overcomes the good guys. Of course that is very awkward if you are writing from the viewpoint that the True God is on your side so leaving it vague is the best way to resolve the problem.
See the myth of Iphigenia for the Classical world's belief in the efficacy of a royal child sacrifice, as well. And one that was ambiguous, because by placating the goddess Agamemnon set up the circumstances for his wife's hatred and his murder when he eventually comes home from Troy.
There seems to be an Incan near-analog as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Llullaillaco cites somewhat different selection criteria (not the crown prince, exactly but:
"Children were chosen from all over the sprawling Inca empire and were picked primarily based on their "physical perfection". Children chosen for sacrifice were generally "sons and daughters of nobles and local rulers"")
You give the gods your best, which is why the trickery with sacrifices as recounted by the Greeks:
"Prometheus loved man more then the Olympians, who had banished most of his family to Tartarus. So when Zeus decreed that man must present a portion of each animal they sacrificed to the gods Prometheus decided to trick Zeus. He created two piles, one with the bones wrapped in juicy fat, the other with the good meat hidden in the hide. He then bade Zeus to pick. Zeus picked the bones. Since he had given his word Zeus had to accept that as his share for future sacrifices. In his anger over the trick he took fire away from man. However, Prometheus lit a torch from the sun and brought it back again to man. Zeus was enraged that man again had fire. He decided to inflict a terrible punishment on both man and Prometheus."
Good point! I wonder if any culture imagined a deity which was satisfied with second-best, a "God of Half-Measures"? :-)
Lots of old Bible stories seem to betray an enotheistic worldview: each people has their own god backing them in their corner, ours just happens to be the most awesome and powerful one. There's no denial for example that the Pharaoh's priests really COULD turn their staves into snakes: but Moses' staff-snake still eats their puny weakling staff-snakes. They do possess real magic. The Book of Exodus is best thought as Yahweh marching into Ra's territory and pummeling him into submission as he casts curse upon curse on his worshippers' land.
Your Pharaoh argument is incorrect. The magicians are able to match the first few plagues with their magic. But when they are unable to match the next plague, they say "this is the finger of god(s)". That is to say, if magic can do it, it's not divine intervention.
The distinction between "magic" and "divine intervention" is a very recent development. Historically, they were synonymous. Magic spells are just the proper way of pleading to the gods.
Magic was just understood as some kind of otherworldly power helping you at the time. Notice how Christian's later history of dealing with witchcraft is basically "if you're doing miraculous stuff and you're not receiving help from God, it must be from the Other Guy", and that held also for supposed "white" magic with on its face beneficial effects. If the Pharaoh's priest could do some magic tricks it must be that some deity backed them (or a later Christian would probably say a demon). In D&D terms, it's all Warlocks and Clerics - no Wizards as we imagine them today.
There is a cute comment cited in https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/003521.html
"the apocryphal story of Don Wollheim remarketing the Bible as an Ace Double -- WAR GOD OF ISRAEL on one side, THE THING WITH THREE SOULS on the other?"
Cain may have started the first city, but the suburbs are inhabited by the descendants of Abel. It is for this reason that we call commuting groups "Abelian".
Love it!
Oh, wonderful!
Would love to see you review The Origins of Woke. Hanania is a lot cooler and more rational in print than he is on Twitter -- I sometimes found myself wondering "Is this the same guy who writes the crazy Tweets about Jeffrey Epstein and wants the Israelis to drive all the Palestinians out of Gaza?".
Tom Holland's Dominion is another sympathetic portrayal of the impact of Christianity, though he's not a Christian. Would also make for an interesting review. But it's a long book, and I'm not sure the thesis is sufficiently different from Girard's to make it worth your time.
It's a wonder to me that anyone comes across as rational on Twitter, since it's the epitome of the 'hot take'.
As opposed to a book, which for most people will take months (or years) to write, with multiple opportunities for revision before the public sees it.
>wants the Israelis to drive all the Palestinians out of Gaza
Isn't his family from Palestine?
Yes, but he's one of the good ones.
That strikes me as consistent, if anything. It'd be strange if he still lived there while saying that Israel should drive them out.
I mean, maybe Hanania just has good editors who cut out the most Nazi-sounding shit from his books, while the unedited stream of consciousness that Twitter allows is... far less charitable.
Mimetic desire is all about achieving certainty. Thing is there are other ways to do this. It's just that mimicry is so fundamental and such a powerful way to settle uncertainty. For this, Girard's fixating on it (and anyone reading Girard) is useful. Scott you originally put me on to The Secret to Our Success. Do you see the connection between Henrich's insights about people (Ie learning by copying) and Girard? I happened to read both that book and this one about the same time, and what I think happens with Girard and Girardians generally is a fixation on a hugely important aspect of human behavior, one especially relevant in a world connected by social media.
The most important victims of wokeness are not the people cancelled on Twitter but those who suffer as the result of woke movements like the increased number of murders and car accidents after the BLM - Defund the Police movement and those who are discriminated from getting a job for being a straight white male.
“you are caught up in it like a leaf in the wind”
Ah, sentences like that always makes me think of the most magnificent scene in “Elizabeth: The golden age”. Cate Blanchett is fantastic as Elizabeth I, but equally great in this scene is the Irish actor William Houston, who plays the Spanish Ambassador to England: Don Guerau de Spes. It is he who utters the immortal line: “You see a leaf fall, and you think you know which way the wind blows.” Link to the scene here, it is the "I too, can command the wind sir"-scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMpigAUQt_4
Ok, this is a total digression, but is not that what a comment section is for…
Just 2 pick 2 nits: a) Luke was writing in Greek - so saying "Lightning" is "barak" in Hebrew and thus "the bible says Obama is evil" is ... gives me tooth-pain. Sure, Obama means sth. evil in some language, too. (I am aware the Qanons did that, not Scott.)
b) Paraclete (the Greek word for "advocatus" who you "call to" be your helper at court) is ONLY an expression for the holy spirit in a few places in John. Mostly, the evangelists use Greek "pneuma" to speak of the "ruach elochim", the spirit of the Lord.
Yeah, came here to say the first point. It's silly to say Luke was using the Hebrew word when that wasn't the language it was written in, it's a strange backtranslation.
Not sure if this is relevant to Girard at all--Scott kind of addresses it in the passage toward the end about the antichrist --but isn’t the biggest difference between Christianity and wokeness the imperative to forgive?
Christianity explicitly codifies the value of turning the other cheek (i.e. forgiving those that have wronged us), discouraging victimization of the persecutor, whereas wokeness contains no such imperative; thus, adherents wantonly victimize any wrongdoer, whether real or imagined.
I’d never defend Christianity (or any religion/ spirituality for that matter), but I’ve always admired the Christian imperative to forgive and, today, I certainly wish that I saw more forgiveness in our society for wrongs committed ... whether real or imagined.
"Girard admires Nietzsche for correctly identifying the core of Christianity as a previously unprecedented form of morality that supported victims and the oppressed (as opposed to pagan “master morality”, which supported the powerful and popular). "
Thanks for writing this review. I now understand better how some of the tech billionaires end up talking so much about Girard and Nietzsche. I find your skepticism of Girard convincing.
Note that this review includes a gross misread of nietzsche, see other posts in this comment section for clarification.
That Nietzsche was "on the side of master morality", was protoNazi propaganda.
I'm reading the darkening age by Catherine Nixey and it describes the early history of Christianity as full of mob violence against pagan temples and the destruction of art and literatures. This contradicts Girard's characterization of Christianity as more peaceable as compared to paganism.
This is because Nixey's book is egregiously poor scholarship:
https://historyforatheists.com/2017/11/review-catherine-nixey-the-darkening-age/
“As a result of recent work, it can be stated with confidence that temples were neither widely converted into churches nor widely demolished in Late Antiquity. …. In his Empire-wide study, Bayliss located only 43 cases [of desacralisation or active architectural destruction of temples] of which a mere 4 were archaeologically confirmed.” (Lavan, “The End of the Temples: Toward a New Narrative?” in Lavan and Mulryan, p. xxiv)"
"Also counter to Nixey’s story is the evidence of temple repair and preservation, sometimes by Christian rulers and administrators, in the very period in which according to Nixey mobs were rampaging across the Empire tearing down every temple in sight. Several laws were decreed to protect art works (C.Th. 16.10.15) and esteemed buildings and temples (C.Th. 16.10.18) and Lavan notes “in regions such as Africa, Greece and Italy, temple preservation seems to have been a more prominent process than temple destruction” (p. xxxvii)."
And of course, the survival of classical literature to the present day is entirely due to the work of christian scriptoria.
Thanks for sharing. Though this is a terrible review and I struggled to get through the angry tone and long tirades that don't address the book's content at all. I am not surprised that there were some instances that go against Nixey's story. Is that it? if that is the case, I would still recommend the book.
De gustibus non disputandum as regards tone. I feel the review takes an appropriate tone given the shoddy and polemical scholarship in Nixey's work.
To say the review doesn't address the book's content is just wrong - he summarises Nixey's core arguments and then provides primary and secondary sources to show they're nonsense.
It's not the case that there were 'some instances that go against Nixey's story', rather that Nixey's narrative is a complete fiction based on wilful misrepresentation of a small number of isolated incidents, and the overwhelming consensus of serious scholars in the field is the diametric opposite of her position.
Why do you assume I haven't read the book? For anyone interested in the topic 'The Final Pagan Generation' is a far superior account.
Thanks I'll check out the final pagan. Though the book blurb is about mobs and violence perpetrated against the pagans, so it doesn't sound like a different story overall.
You might prefer the video version of the review, then, at 8:06 here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWfa3PKqXuI
But I think if you find Nixey convincing, there's not much to be said.
No this is terrible.
Nixey is about as reliable as any crank. She has an axe to grind, produced a work of pop culture masquerading as scholarship, and went with the popular and praised view of "Christians always terribad! If not for them, would be living in paradise now! Ancient world so tolerant and enlightened!"
It's in the vein of Greenblatt's "The Swerve", and in my own view, the whole "The Secret" set of self-help confidence trickery: just put your wish out there to the Universe and you will get it! It's Mysticism! It's Science! It's a floor wax and a dessert topping!
I'm grateful for this review, because once I ordered this book through inter-library loan and it sat almost unopened on the night table until it was time to return. Reading it gave me a muddled feeling. (I seem to have a sense when things are going to be murky, or incoherent, and unlike SA I don't have the bandwidth to penetrate the murk.) Nonetheless I am glad to have a better idea of the idea within.
Hi Scott!
Thanks for the thoughtful review! However, I'm not sure why you claim that Girard offers a "theory of everything"... and then give him demerits for the theory failing to explain everything. Wouldn't it be more sensible to treat his ideas like Newtonian physics... concepts that explain a lot of useful things, but only in the appropriate realm with certain limitations? For instance, can you provide the quote where he said that ALL myths conform to his pattern?
One aspect that also could be pointed out in support of his scapegoat theory is that nearly all ancient societies had sacrificial rituals, most of them involving human sacrifice. Why did the Aztecs and the Carthaginians sacrifice so many people? His thesis is that the original scapegoat killing brought peace to the community, and so the people in power made sure to keep doing remembrance sacrifices to keep the peace. (a la Hunger Games) This mechanism was independently "discovered" on every continent, because the tribes that didn't discover this process, killed themselves off in blood feuds. It's an intriguing natural selection sort of argument for the beginning of pagan religions.
Sacrifices generally stopped as Christianity spread. For example, first century Jerusalem supposedly had upwards of 1.2 million animals slaughtered in a single day… but nowadays (most) Jews don’t offer any animal sacrifices, as far as I know. Stories of the Native Americans’ contact with the Gospel are similar.
But if Girard's thesis is wrong, then what else explains the prevalence of human sacrifice in ancient society?
Kind regards,
David
Nit: "One aspect that also could be pointed out in support of his scapegoat theory is that nearly all ancient societies had sacrificial rituals, most of them involving human sacrifice. Why did the Aztecs and the Carthaginians sacrifice so many people?"
To the extent that Girard emphasizes sacrificing a _single_ scapegoat, this seems to me to be a substantially different custom from _mass_ sacrifice, albeit with human sacrifice as a common element.
"But if Girard's thesis is wrong, then what else explains the prevalence of human sacrifice in ancient society?" Wild guess: Maybe as a costly signal (of piety??)???
I agree that maybe it would be more interesting to see Girard as trying to explain a certain kind of myth that is puzzling for modern people rather than as offering a theory of all myths.
I thought that the Jews stopped animal sacrifices when the Temple was destroyed by the Romans (since the Temple was where sacrifices were supposed to happen).
Hi Kristian!
That's true that sacrifices came to a dramatic halt when the Temple was destroyed. But if the Temple was instantly rebuilt and back online today, none of the Jews I know would think that they now need to make actual sacrifices.
Kind regards,
David
Yes, that is no doubt true, but after almost 2000 years it must seem strange to them. At least theoretically animal sacrifices are still a potential part of their religion. You say, if the Temple was rebuilt — how does the modern Jew think of the importance/role of the Temple and the idea of rebuilding it, if it isn’t a place for sacrifice?
I've read of a faction of orthodox Jews who do want to both physically rebuilt the Temple and restart actual sacrifices. Here is the url of a very strange article: https://www.countere.com/home/a-red-heifer-is-the-secret-to-understanding-the-israel-hamas-war . ( Religion sounds crazy enough to me to start with, but the notion that three different religions, all of which think that their deity controls all of time and space, *also* think that their deity deeply cares about a particular few hundred square meters of real estate, sounds to me like tin-foil-hat levels of delusion. )
> „But if Girard‘s thesis is wrong, then what else explains the prevalence of human sacrifice in ancient society?“
They really thought their societal fortunes, say the annual harvest, depended on the gods; so they tried to appease the gods, whom they conceptualised like mafia bosses, with the costliest sacrifice that they could make.
I think the question Girard is trying to answer is what actual functional social role did the sacrifices play, besides what the ancient societies thought they were doing.
I meant this as a straightforward explanation of the prevalence of human sacrifice in ancient societies, of the form „this is what motivated them to perform this behavior“. Then is then no question of „what actual functional social role did the behaviour play“, although I guess it‘s logically possible that there was some societal benefit that outweighed the huge cost.
Functionalist anthropologists take it as an axiom that everything has an „actual functional social role“, but this is hardly better than when biologists thought for a while that every animal behaviour must be for the good of the species.
Yes, but it isn't a satisfying "straightforward explanation" because it isn't true (according to us) that the harvests depended on the sacrifices to the gods. (The straightforward explanation of Islam is that it was revealed to Mohammed by Allah; everyone who doesn't believe that needs another explanation (which is probably lost to history). )
This question about sacrifice is just a subquestion of the larger question, "what is the origin of religious belief and practice if it isn't divine"?
When I say "functional social role", I don't mean that the impacts of it were necessarily beneficial.
Why should people believe they could improve their harvest by sacrificing to the gods? I think that the concept of „impersonal mechanical event“ was not invented yet, and thus the world appeared full of gods and spirits, who directed or at least caused all events. Such as the weather. Nietzsche (who appears in the book review and is discussed elsewhere in the comment section) writes in Gay Science: „Now man believed originally that wherever he saw something happen, a will had to be at work in the background as a cause, and a personal, willing being. Any notion of mechanics was far from his mind.“
For a similar-style subquestion-level answer to your larger question consider how, without an understanding of evolution by natural selection, the world more or less inevitably appears to be created by intentional agency, because of the apparent design in it.
I doubt Christianity has anything to do with stopping human sacrifices. For example, China banned the practice in 384 BCE, which obviously rules out the possibility of Christianity having any influence. Many other civilizations stopped doing it even before they started recording history. The more reasonable explanation is that the sacrifices stopped because society was becoming more stable, and it just wasn't necessary anymore.
Or it stopped once educated elites understood that the weather is a mechanical system rather than the effect of the actions of the weather god, whom you would desperately try to appease in order to end a drought. Admittedly this is speculative.
Girard countered this claim with his now celebrated aphorism: “We didn’t stop burning witches because we invented science; we invented science because we stopped burning witches.”
The problem with this is that witch trials massively increased during the same period that the Scientific Revolution was taking place. Johannes Kepler defended his own mother against charges of witchcraft.
If this is celebrated because it is witty and counterintuitive, that would just underline that seeing the invention of philosophy as the root cause is the more naive/obvious perspective. In any case, anomie‘s point about China comes into play. My question to Girard would be, why was philosophy invented at more or less exactly the same time in Greece, India and China, three independent societies distant from each other? This is the „Axial Age“, about 500 to 300 BCE. (I know little about the Jewish history that Girard emphasises according to the book review, but may have read that „Second-Temple Judaism“ also counts as an axial philosophy/religion.)
The Aztecs engaged in human sacrifice because they believed the gods who oversaw the necessary natural processes of the world were weakened and needed 'transfusions' of power to repay the debt that humanity owed them, and to strengthen them in their battles against the forces of darkness:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture
"Sacrifice was a common theme in the Aztec culture. In the Aztec "Legend of the Five Suns", all the gods sacrificed themselves so that mankind could live. Some years after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, a body of the Franciscans confronted the remaining Aztec priesthood and demanded, under threat of death, that they desist from this traditional practice. The Aztec priests defended themselves as follows:
'Life is because of the gods; with their sacrifice, they gave us life. ... They produce our sustenance ... which nourishes life.'
What the Aztec priests were referring to was a cardinal Mesoamerican belief: that a great and continuing sacrifice by the gods sustains the Universe. A strong sense of indebtedness was connected with this worldview. Indeed, nextlahualli (debt-payment) was a commonly used metaphor for human sacrifice, and, as Bernardino de Sahagún reported, it was said that the victim was someone who "gave his service".
The Carthaginians are interesting; there is an ongoing debate among historians about whether they actually did perform child sacrifice, and that this was just propaganda by their enemies, as against the burial sites of infants and animals that are held to provide evidence of the practice:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tophet#Carthage_and_the_western_Mediterranean
"Archaeologists have applied the term "tophet" to large cemeteries of children found at Carthaginian sites that have traditionally been believed to house the victims of child sacrifice, as described by Hellenistic and biblical sources. This interpretation is controversial, with some scholars arguing that the tophets may have been children's cemeteries, rejecting Hellenistic sources as anti-Carthaginian propaganda. Others argue that not all burials in the tophet were sacrifices.
...Greco-Roman sources also reference child sacrifice, such as an attempt at Tyre to revive a custom of sacrificing a boy during Alexander the Great's Siege of Tyre in 332 BCE, recorded by first century CE Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus. The church historian Eusebius (3rd century CE) quotes from Philo of Byblos's Phoenician history that:
It was a custom of the ancients in great crises of danger for the rulers of a city or nation, in order to avert the common ruin, to give up the most beloved of their children for sacrifice as a ransom to the avenging daemons; and those who were thus given up were sacrificed with mystic rites. Kronos then, whom the Phoenicians call Elus, who was king of the country and subsequently, after his decease, was deified as the star Saturn, had by a nymph of the country named Anobret an only begotten son, whom they on this account called ledud, the only begotten being still so called among the Phoenicians; and when very great dangers from war had beset the country, he arrayed his son in royal apparel, and prepared an altar, and sacrificed him.
...Although a minority of scholars has argued that the tophet ritual described in the Bible was a harmless activity that did not involve sacrificing any children, the majority of scholars agree that the Bible depicts human sacrifice as occurring at the tophet.
...Various Greek and Roman sources describe the Carthaginians as engaging in the practice of sacrificing children by burning as part of their religion. These descriptions were compared to those found in the Hebrew Bible. The ancient descriptions were seemingly confirmed by the discovering of the so-called "Tophet of Salambô" in Carthage in 1921, which contained the urns of cremated children. However, modern historians and archaeologists debate the reality and extent of this practice. Some scholars propose that all remains at the Tophet were sacrificed, whereas others propose that only some were.
In Phoenician sites throughout the Western Mediterranean (except for Spain and Ibiza), archaeology has revealed fields full of buried urns containing the burnt remains of human infants and lambs, covered by carved stone monuments. These fields are conventionally referred to as "tophets" by archaeologists, after the location in the Bible. When Carthaginian inscriptions refer to these locations, they use the terms bt (house, temple or sanctuary) or qdš (shrine), not "tophet". Archaeology reveals two "generations" of Punic tophets: those founded by Phoenician colonists between 800 and 400 BCE; and those founded under Carthaginian influence (direct or indirect) in North Africa from the 4th century BCE onward.
...Inscriptions are most common in the Tophet of Salammbó at Carthage, where there are thousands of examples. There are some from other tophets as well. Matthew McCarty cites CIS I.2.511 as a typical inscription:
To Lady Tanit, face of Baal, and to Lord Baal Hammon: [that] which Arisham son of Bodashtart, son of Bodeshmun vowed (ndr); because he (the god) heard his (Arisham's) voice, he blessed him.
Thus, these texts present the monument as a votive offering to the gods, in thanks for favor received from them. Sometimes the final clause instead reads "may he (the god) hear his voice," (i.e. in expectation of a future favor). The individual making the offering is almost always a single individual, nearly always male. The dead child is never mentioned. Tanit appears only in examples from Carthage. Other inscriptions refer to the ritual as mlk or molk. The meaning of this term is uncertain, but it appears to be the same word as the Biblical term "Molech" discussed above. The inscriptions distinguish between mlk b'l / mlk ʿdm (molk of a citizen/person) and mlk ʿmr (molk of a lamb)."
The unanswered question here is - why children? They were sacrificing animals, which all civilisations in the area would have understood as a religious practice; even an exceptional sacrifice of a child in time of danger, as in the example from Eusebius, would have not been unknown. But what looks like routine child sacrifice? Why? Of whom? Their own children?
That's what hasn't been answered satisfactorily as yet. And that is what seems to have marked them out as unusual and hence for condemnation by other cultures.
Hi Deiseach!
Thanks for the detailed and informative reply! To answer your question (why children?), I remember hearing Girard (or someone explaining Girard) that the scapegoat victim (in this case a child) had to be proximally associated with the citizens, but not so important that the death would disrupt society in other ways. In other words, if the patriarch of one family did something that sparked a blood feud in the town, a scapegoat is needed to restore the peace (otherwise the families will tear each other apart in civil war or a cycle of honor killings). However, if the patriarch himself is chosen as the scapegoat, the family structure and their land and livelihoods will fall into chaos/ruin. So instead, something else is chosen... a child, his right-hand servant, or his favorite horse... depending on severity of the original crime.
This process is suggested as the precursor to the more ritualized sacrifices (killing a child every Tuesday just for the sake of communal harmony), and also the precursor to our modern justice systems where we now insist that the punishment falls directly on the perpetrator. He supported it with references to Native American history, if I remember correctly. And these ideas might me more from his book Violence and the Sacred than the one Scott reviewed.
Kind regards,
David
When I saw this review in my mailbox, I thought it might be about Ada Palmer's "Too Like the Lightning". Which is one of the better fiction series I've read in the last few years. And, after reading the review, it seems bears almost the same resemblance to serious work of philosophy as the reviewed book (i.e. very little, but it, too, has interesting ideas in it, despite somewhat dense writing).
It's a minor point, but if you look in Leviticus 16:21-22 the scapegoat is explicitly not killed but sent away alive into the wilderness, unlike other the goat that is offered as a sacrifice. The ritual as recorded in the Mishnah does involve the goat being killed in the wilderness, which raises interesting interpretation questions (did the ritual change? was it always intended to be interpreted that way? was it intentionally written in a way different from how it was practiced?). But if you're going to derive a theology of social change through atonement from the biblical story of the scapegoat in Leviticus, you could just as easily read the scapegoat as a model of sparing something rather than killing something.
" But “lightning” in Hebrew is barak. So the Bible says Satan will descend to Earth in the form of Barak. Seems like a relevant Bible verse for insane right-wing conspiracy theorists!"
Except that Barak means "blessed" in Arabic...
Lighting in Hebrew and Arabic are the same semitic word ברק/برق (BaRaQ)
Bless in Hebrew and Arabic come from a different root, but are also the same semitic word. ברך/بارك (BaraC)
Aaron Smith-Teller on this one: https://www.tumblr.com/aaronsmithtumbler/173186030050/this-is-barack-obama-with-ehud-barak-even-though
This is a great review, now it makes me want to read this book because (1) I had no idea it came from as late as 1999, I thought it was one of those 1950s productions like Colin Wilson's "The Outsider" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outsider_(Wilson_book) (2) I had no idea Girard was "a good Catholic" and I have to admit, that bit made me eyeroll slightly since I have no interest in reading another Ernest Renan but the rest of the review leads me to think this is not the case. Excellent!
Points in no particular order:
(A) My gosh yes, that is a dreadful cover illustration. I presume it is taken from a picture of St. Paul falling off his horse on the road to the Damascus so it's connected to Christianity but I have no idea why this particular event was picked (I imagine as a cheap alternative to getting an illustrator/artist to do a proper book cover, I've seen these kinds of terrible but cheap cover art on other books that are Kindle versions and/or self-published)
(B) Nietzsche! I thought about him and his "Christianity is slave morality" at the start of the review, and I am gratified to find that I was on the same lines as Girard 😀
(C) "Most pagan myths have nothing to do with the single-victim process (eg labors of Hercules, Jason and the Golden Fleece, rape of Persephone, the Iliad, the Trojan Horse, the Odyssey, etc, etc, etc). "
Well.... you can kinda find the idea there if you poke about a bit (rather like the "all myths are a disease of language/all myths are solar myths/all myths are vegetation myths with the dying-and-returning god" crazes of comparative religion studies in the 19th century to find One Single Great Arc, come on down Sir James Frazer with your Golden Bough).
Hercules is, in a sense, *the* single victim; he's always going crazy and murdering people in a fit of rage, then having to go be purified of that crime and do penance. So he is both the cause of your troubles (just ask his music tutor) and the victim who becomes a god. The famous labours are an example of his expiation of his crimes:
"Driven mad by Hera, Heracles slew his own children. To expiate the crime, Heracles was required to carry out ten labours set by his archenemy, Eurystheus, who had become king in Heracles' place. If he succeeded, he would be purified of his sin and, as myth says, he would become a god, and be granted immortality."
His death comes about as a means of his apotheosis; only his mortal part is burned away by the funeral pyre, leaving his immortal self to ascend to Olympus, marry Hebe, and be worshipped as a god or hero in future.
Persephone is herself one of the dying-and-returning vegetation goddesses, she is Spring who is carried off to the Underworld; her mother's anger and grief means that mortals suffer from famine; she returns to the upper world, but has to periodically return back to Hades as the vegetation withers in winter. And she is also associated with the other dying-and-returning vegetation god, Adonis:
"Aphrodite found the baby, and took him to the underworld to be fostered by Persephone. She returned for him once he was grown and discovered him to be strikingly handsome. However, Persephone too found Adonis to be exceedingly handsome and wanted to keep Adonis for she too fell in love with him; Zeus settled the dispute by decreeing that Adonis would spend one third of the year with Aphrodite, one third with Persephone, and one third with whomever he chose. Adonis chose Aphrodite, and they remained constantly together. Another version states that both goddesses got to keep him for half the year each at the suggestion of the Muse Calliope."
But yeah, this is one of those "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" situations.
(C) Jonah's case is slightly different; yes, the sailors were right to cast his overboard, but Jonah didn't die, he was saved by being swallowed by the great fish and then cast up on land later. Jonah is not a sacrificial victim, but rather has to learn both obedience to the will of God and mercy.
(D) "Richard Hanania has a new book out by this title. I hope to review it soon. He claims that wokeness originated in civil rights laws from the 1960s."
The particular modern version calling itself (or called by its opponents) wokeness does like to claim legitmacy from the 60s Civil Rights struggle, but it's morphed into a hydra-headed beast of many aspirations, and there's an awful lot of whiteness involved in it. The African-American concept of "woke" is something different and goes back a lot further:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
"The phrase stay woke has been present in AAVE since the 1930s. In some contexts, it referred to an awareness of social and political issues affecting African Americans.
...Black American folk singer-songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly, used the phrase "stay woke" as part of a spoken afterword to a 1938 recording of his song "Scottsboro Boys", which tells the story of nine black teenagers and young men falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. In the recording, Lead Belly says he met with the defendant's lawyer and the young men themselves, and "I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there (Scottsboro) – best stay woke, keep their eyes open."
Original wokeness was "be careful, there's a good chance of getting lynched in this place here"; modern wokeness is "you micro aggressed me!"
(E) "Girard thinks wokeness looks kind of like Christianity, makes a superficially-credible claim to be Christianity, but stands against Christianity (because it tries to justify victimization)."
I feel a Chesterton quote coming on. From "Orthodoxy":
"The phrases of the street are not only forcible but subtle: for a figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition. Phrases like “put out” or “off colour” might have been coined by Mr. Henry James in an agony of verbal precision. And there is no more subtle truth than that of the everyday phrase about a man having “his heart in the right place.” It involves the idea of normal proportion; not only does a certain function exist, but it is rightly related to other functions. Indeed, the negation of this phrase would describe with peculiar accuracy the somewhat morbid mercy and perverse tenderness of the most representative moderns. If, for instance, I had to describe with fairness the character of Mr. Bernard Shaw, I could not express myself more exactly than by saying that he has a heroically large and generous heart; but not a heart in the right place. And this is so of the typical society of our time.
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful. For example, Mr. Blatchford attacks Christianity because he is mad on one Christian virtue: the merely mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity. He has a strange idea that he will make it easier to forgive sins by saying that there are no sins to forgive. Mr. Blatchford is not only an early Christian, he is the only early Christian who ought really to have been eaten by lions. For in his case the pagan accusation is really true: his mercy would mean mere anarchy. He really is the enemy of the human race — because he is so human."
The cure is proportion, to be in the right place, and not to be isolated and magnified. All the virtues are needed, and need to work together.
(F) "The Son of God brought from Heaven to Earth a single Word of the ineffable Divine speech, and that word was “VICTIM”.
I thought the Word was Logos:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos_(Christianity)
But hey, O Salutaris Hostia works too! 😀
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_salutaris_hostia
And while we're giving Nietzsche a kicking, again from "Orthodoxy":
"Of course, this shrinking from the brutal vivacity and brutal variety of common men is a perfectly reasonable and excusable thing as long as it does not pretend to any point of superiority. It is when it calls itself aristocracy or aestheticism or a superiority to the bourgeoisie that its inherent weakness has in justice to be pointed out. Fastidiousness is the most pardonable of vices; but it is the most unpardonable of virtues. Nietzsche, who represents most prominently this pretentious claim of the fastidious, has a description somewhere — a very powerful description in the purely literary sense — of the disgust and disdain which consume him at the sight of the common people with their common faces, their common voices, and their common minds. As I have said, this attitude is almost beautiful if we may regard it as pathetic. Nietzsche’s aristocracy has about it all the sacredness that belongs to the weak. When he makes us feel that he cannot endure the innumerable faces, the incessant voices, the overpowering omnipresence which belongs to the mob, he will have the sympathy of anybody who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in a crowded omnibus. Every man has hated mankind when he was less than a man. Every man has had humanity in his eyes like a blinding fog, humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell. But when Nietzsche has the incredible lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask us to believe that his aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong muscles or an aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary to point out the truth. It is an aristocracy of weak nerves."
There is an author – I have forgotten which – who compared the life of Nietzsche and his chosen antagonist, Socrates.
Nietzsche: Suffering a total nervous breakdown after seeing a horse getting flogged, and spending his last years more-or-less catatonic, kept alive by his sister. Socrates: Fighting honorably in the war in his youth, standing up to the standard spiritual assumptions of his day, calmly accepting his death sentence, and merrily drinking the hemlock while partying with good friends. Whose life more closely resembles that of the Ubermensch?
“Performative inconsistency” is the technical term for Nietzsche’s life.
You might want to test whether the reviewer's characterization of Girard as a "good Catholic" would stand scrutiny by the Church. It's true that he is steeped in the catholic culture, but I think he's not quite in-the-club when promoting ideas like the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross primarily resulted in a landmark event declaring sacrificial substitution itself to be overcome. It's a good idea, just not entirely orthodox. You can imagine the value, however, in this being the one sacrifice that stands for all those before it. Still, it seems to me, people continue to insist on scapegoating to relieve whatever demons possess their souls, and Girard makes a significant contribution in that regard. You might enjoy reading Jean-Michel Oughourlian's The Puppet of Desire that explains the possession of the Nuns of Loudun, or at least watch Ken Russell's weird film The Devils.
Oh, I'm well aware of Russell's film and have seen it 😀
Regarding A: I think it’s an appropriate cover for the book and it’s easy to see why this scene was chosen: when Paul fell from the horse he heard a voice saying “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" (Acts 9:4). Paul’s conversion follows, culminating with “and he began at once to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, that he is the Son of God.” (Acts 9:20). So it was the moment when he got insight into the ultimate instance of the “single-victim process”, or in other words saw “Satan fall like lightning”.
But "Saul struck by lightning" identifies St Paul with Satan which is not a great analogy. Unless it is intended to represent the moment Saul the persecutor/prosecution (a la Satan) changes to Paul the evangelist of the Saving Victim.
I still think the book publishers were looking for a cheap image they didn't have to pay copyright for usage on, though 😁
EDIT: I knew I recognised that Mannerist style; it's The Conversion of Saint Paul by Parmigianino:
https://artisthesolution.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-conversion-of-saint-paul-by.html
The book cover is one of those little things that irk me; I know they're a small press and trying to save money where they can, but I do wish they had splurged on proper graphic design, instead of this "Let's get an intern to clip out the main images using a graphics package and stick them on a plain black background with basic bitch font".
Whatever one may think of Girard's philosophy, he was a serious scholar and his work deserves more to make it stand out than this kind of dime-a-dozen self-published obscure tat book cover. I know you don't judge a book by its cover, but when the book looks like any number of fiction works by semi-pro authors on Kindle, then the lack of professionalism counts against it.
Not denying that the cut&paste job was a cheap and uninspiring way to obtain a book cover, but I respectfully disagree on the symbolics of the scene, I think it’s actually pretty deep.
From Scott's review, I gather that Girard equates "Satan" with the "single-victim process" and the “fall of Satan" would be dismantling of this process. On the one hand, up until this point Paul was a willful part of the mob, hence part of the process, hence his private fall from the horse would be symbolic for the larger fall of the process (Satan). On the other hand, Paul hadn't yet "seen" the fall of Satan, i.e., understood the meaning of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, but then through a divine intervention he finally did. With this other reading, his literal fall from the horse would be a red herring. But I think both readings are correct at the same time and he is both the subject and the object of the titular sentence. In a way, seeing the fall is the fall.
There’s another layer of confusion, since Paul actually went blind for couple days after his “accident”, but it might have been to pull a Craik–O'Brien–Cornsweet over the symbolic domain: he had to lose his sight to be able to regain it, which symbolizes insight.
Also, I did know that about the Paraclete! It is often also translated as "Comforter", but yes - defence attorney is the original meaning! 😁
There's a rational reason to lean (at least slightly) towards wokeness: Tolerating injustice sets a precedent, which lowers the threshold for further injustice, until nobody can rely on justice anymore. This way I argue myself into supporting people, who otherwise wouldn't mobilize my empathy.
My experience with very woke people is, they are divers. There's the scheming faker, who picked up the rules of the game and plays to exert power. There's the wayward rationalist, simply getting to emotional. There are lots of them believing honestly in the good of their cause.
Wokeness looks to me like the logical successor of the politically correct 1990s/2000s and whatever movements paved the way before. There's a slight chance it develops further into an application of realistical justice and a fair chance it get's eaten by history in a few decades. I hope for the 1st option.
Re mimetic desire as the basis of all, or almost all, desire: I'm open to this theory as a hypothesis on which to base research. But for acceptance, I'd want to see years of careful studies of living people. As is, I'm skeptical. The toy example and others I've seen (often the tired one about why suburbanites buy new cars) seem to me to follow the same pattern as "We have the story of Jesus. See? All myth is about single-victim sacrifice." One sees plenty of examples of kids playing happily side by side with different toys, and plenty of suburbanites who hate having to buy a new car and put it off as long as possible. And in the hands of Girard, I think the idea of mimetic desire comes with some clear baggage, including a not-small degree of misanthropy and hostility to desire as such. My memory is that somewhere G. suggests that mimetic desire is the, or a, curse of our fallen state, and I sense in him an implication that, in a before-the-fall state, it is not that we would we experience authentic desire, but no desire at all--except perhaps to obey the divine command. I wonder if in part he's thinking of Augustine's idea that, before the Fall, Adam and Eve had sex without pleasure or desire, simply as a rational response to God's command to be fruitful and multiply.
I appreciate how any grand theory of "wokeness" that goes beyond the bugaboos of the present moment stumbles upon the fact that it's just a term for moral progress.
Wokeness is just a term for moral progress.
Cancelling is just holding people accountable.
Punching up is always right.
Political correctness is only being polite.
The gulags were just holiday camps.
It's disappointing that even earnest steelmanning of "wokeness" mostly avoids granting it its core objective of equality. Instead, we get the victim-oppressor model which is just applied right-wing/hierarchy-minded derision again. This makes inevitable the discourse of envy and craving the psychological rewards of mob justice against the oppressor. And the less said the better about any model where the poor cancelled racist takes on the Christ-like aura of the sacrificial lamb.
Personally, I see equality (of power) as a basic consequence of innate human dignity, barely if at all contingent. It's an intrinsic value. Left-wing politics is the only thing that even purports to try to optimise for it (and is willing to make the requisite trade-offs against overall prosperity), so I find myself aligned with it, whether or not I roll my eyes at the occasional bit of silliness.
It is not.
As a lifelong progressive, born and raised in a progressive household and raising my children with those values, living and working deep in the heart of politically-blue America, I deeply wish that it was. _Deeply_ wish.
But it is not.
It's really not "just a term for moral progress", it's at least a specific cultural movement that joins both goals *and means* considered optimal for achieving moral progress. There obviously are other possible views on how to pursue moral progress, and people on the left in the 2010s chose this specific set of them. It's kind of a joke how the same people who go on at length about others needing to examine their own unspoken cultural assumptions are unwilling to admit they have them too and instead argue theirs is merely the Default any sane and good person has to converge to.
I prefer Tom Holland’s explanation that leftism is what happened when a Christian cultural environment became unmoored from actual Christian theology in our secular age.
>Rene Girard is against this. He shares the basic anti-woke fear that all of this ends in some kind of totalitarian communism, or in a bloody war of all against all where everyone accuses everyone else of being some kind of oppressor.
Well, clearly the solution is to find the leader of the Woke faith, and form a mob to kill them!
This will undoubtedly end the Woke plague!
( following along in the same spirit... )
But first, establish that the leader of the Woke faith weighs the same as a duck! :-)
I would draw it as Slave Morality (Judaism) -> Victim/Oppression Obsession (Judeo-Christianity, later Marxism for the nonbelievers) -> modern wokeness. The only problem with wokeness is it's just degenerate slave morality. Add in the vigor and vibrance of a slave morality that cares about all aspects of life and you get back to liberalism.
...Or we could abandon slave morality entirely. We could have a world where talent and strength are celebrated, not scorned.
Slave Morality celebrates talent and strength but only when subordinated to non-aggression, self-control, compassion, and generosity, and trust me you don't want the alternative.
Oh, obviously I don't expect it to make this country a happier place. This is about survival and human progress, nothing more. Besides, we're basically half-way there already. Wealth is being siphoned upward, our democracy is a brittle facade, and power is ultimately held by those who are unaccountable to most of the populace. All I'm asking is that we stop pretending to care about the weak so we can make the necessary changes to increase efficiency.
While we are talking the modern victim cult, here is something that occurred to me recently. Something which has no doubt been thought through in far more depth by bigger brains before: but as I am an engineering researcher, I'm not that well read in the humanities: so apart from general feedback, I'd be happy to get pointers to sources where this was already more nicely put.
The thing is, in addition to all other aspects of it that are nasty, I think that modern woke victim culture is fairly damaging *for its adherents and followers* (see also Scott's statements elsewhere in the comments about him being their psychiatrist). My theory is that being woke in the modern sense is intrinsically psychologically damaging, because it induces a mindset that actively stifles personal growth.
How so? Well, consider the core societal archetypes societies worked with before the woke virus struck. Who were inspirational stories about? Heroes. Prophets. Historical figures of great importance. Kings, generals. Later, in Christianity (at least the Orthodox and Catholic versions), saints.
Who do we have now? Victims.
And there is one crucial difference between the woke victim, and the archetypes of yore. The latter had agency. And generally, were human beings who had it more or less horrible in at least some ways, were faced with considerable difficulties, but grew with the challenge. And ultimately succeeded, in whatever way was deemed important. For a saint, that could mean being shot through with arrows or fed to the beasts - but he made it to heaven because of his personal growth that let him forgive his attackers, so all good (most heroes of yore instead settled for simply winning a war, and getting the girl - but as I said, there is considerable variety here). The red thread that runs through all these stories, as varied as they are, is that they give examples of people overcoming hardship, and personally growing in the process.
Contrast that to the woke victim. The only agency such a victim has is to exist, and to have suffered some sort of injustice - no personal growth is ever needed, or considered. Or even desired. Typically, the woke movement doesn't care at all about members of the chosen victim groups who actually tried to change their lot: slaves who successfully rebelled, or ghetto inmates who fought back. These are heroes of local cultures (e.g. in Israel), but overall of no importance to those who want to make the world feel guilty for existing.
Obviously, this focus on static victims is in no way a worldview on which one can reflect, nurture oneself by absorbing it, and personally grow.
To be fair, no one seems to ever have directly said that the victims of woke culture were to be used as examples: but crucially, there is almost nothing else that is really being talked about. There are no heroes in the woke world, only villains: and static victims. In such a bleak world, the soul shrivels almost by definition. And it does, as the overall tristesse of the woke crowd shows.
You could make the same argument about Christianity. In fact, that's exactly what Nietzsche did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality
With all due respect, you seem to be missing my point. What I am arguing is that even in Christianity, even if it were a slave morality (a point I personally would contend - but then, there is a reason it's called a belief, so it's a grey area), there is not just room to grow into said morality: but over time, personal growth and reflection to better conform to the tenets of the faith is more or less expected. It's a central part of the whole thing. No one is born a saint, same as no one is born a hero in ancient myths (they might be born with a great fighting body and fantastic reflexes: but the hero part comes from them surviving their struggles, and growing with them).
Contrast that to the average woke mob: you are not supposed to think, you are not supposed to question anything. And you are not supposed to be an identifiable individual. I mean, you might be, but no one cares if you are. The world is black and white, all you need to do is bring the pitchforks and torches, and go with the hate du jour.
Basically, this is the same underlying reason why Communist societies had this uniquely soul-destroying quality: if everything that happens is due to societal processes that are statistical in nature, you as an individual might as well go and hang yourself in the attic - no one cares, you are just an infinitesimally small part of a machine that does not care about you in particular. Yeah, people were supposed to become better socialists, so there were societal education programmes of sorts that went in that direction. But these efforts pretty much always aimed at making people assimilate in society, and put their personal desires second. Or last. Your growth as a personality was of no concern to anyone, or anything - just like in the woke mob.
That's well argued. You make an interesting point (I am also a layman in the humanities, but even if the professions beat you to it, I didn't read them and I did read you!)
If you're thinking of reviewing Hanania's book on the grounds of wokeness being an outgrowth of Civil Rights law (rather than on the grounds that Hanania is also a Substacker, deeply obnoxious, and the two of you have some overlap in fan groups and possibly social circles), you might want to take a look at Christopher Caldwell's Age of Entitlement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Entitlement:_America_Since_the_Sixties) which presents the same thesis but has the advantage of not being written by Hanania. That said, Hanania's book probably has more recent content (Caldwell's released in early 2020 but I think the bulk of it stopped around 2015-2016) that may be of interest but would also be... polarizing.
Typo: "But it’ll do it in such an intellectual and polymathic Continental philosophy way that can’t even get mad."
Presumably should be "that I can't even get mad".
The topic looks like more fun than I deserve.
> Cancellers never kill anybody, just drive them off Twitter for a while...
Cancellers have caused people to commit suicide several times already, though admittedly this doesn't happen as often as in the case of physical mobs.
..."i saw Satan fall like lightning" was Jesus responding to his disciples coming back with joy at how they could perform exorcisms in His name. They had been sent out to preach to the cities under His authority, and part of that was having his ability to exorcise delegated. Jesus was just commenting on their success.
Trying to isolate a single verse from its context is called proof-texting and its very common with the Bible. Frustrating too.
if i understood right, i think mimetic desire is more basic. The natural end of man is to explode in mass violence. To prevent this, we have created a form of cartharsis through the creation of scapegoats. A scapegoat "bears the sins of the world" and enables people to throw their violence onto an object, ritually purging it for a time.
its a common motif of horror films. The Cabin in the Woods for example. There's an old anime called Kakurenbo that does it well. When the game is over, the city's lights go back on...for a while. Now YOU are it.
Jesus i think enables people to transcend this because of an eternal scapegoat. he both called it to attention and exists as an eternal unchanging victim to sacrifice desire on until it is taken away by eternity. Only a divine can bear it for all mankind for all time.
i think wokeness and anti-wokeness is just the return of the scapegoat in weaker forms. Christianity has mediated it for a long time, but without the whole message paganism
reasserts itself. Even with it it still exists, but we are kind of aware only jesus is a true scapegoat, others are not. So there is guilt.
the removal of this will end up in a world where we will see less and less people criticizing cancelling. we will just return to overflowing desire-scapegoating-catharsis as a cycle almost uncontrollable.
there is a second answer that Girard probably doesn't want to think of. Christianity will end scapegoating when Jesus comes back to draw the curtain on history. back to prooftexting-minetic desire is a philosopher looking at sin, and Christianity posits a future world where sin nature itself is destroyed.
the pagan alternative is judgement without heaven, the gods die. may also be a danger are fear to make people tremble, i guess.
The reviewer exposes a bias when they assume Girard is a "good Catholic". I got the feeling the reviewer found no value in this explanation of desire. One experiment with children, for example, found that if you have ten kids in one room with ten identical toys then, instead of each rationally taken one toy, they tend to hang-back until one toy is identified as desirable. I found Girard to be translational to Iroquois torture ceremonies, and Jean-Michel Oughourlian, in The Puppet of Desire, found explanations for the well-documented Loudun possessions. The popularity of short stories like The Harvest also depend on this idea of community and sacrifice. In any case, I think we can all agree that we have needs or requirements (e.g., air, water, food, and shelter), but the next step to needing others is tricky. Of course, the baby needs the adult, and astronauts need rocket scientists, but what do relationships mean in general and particular?
I literally mentioned the exact situation with the children and the toys three times, I don't know what you want from me.
Just mentioning there was a formal study - I thought the examples already given were anecdotal about stereotypes, which can be good evidence, but I wanted to reference the particular study with 10 kids. Love your work. Didn't know you were the reviewer. I don't want more than what you're already doing! tx,
Sociological studies like this are often nonreproducible, so this doesn't add much.
"The reviewer exposes a bias when they assume Girard is a "good Catholic".
I wondered about that bit too, since I've learned to twitch every time someone is described in the media as a "devout/good Catholic". But it looks like Girard at least put the spade work in, so he may not be a raving heretic. Or I should say "may not have been", seems he died in 2015 so God rest the man:
https://iep.utm.edu/girard/
"During the beginning of his career as lecturer, Girard was assigned to teach courses on European literature; he admits he was not at all familiar with the great works of European novelists. As Girard began to read the great European novels in preparation for the course, he became especially engaged with the work of five novelists in particular: Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky and Proust.
His first book, Mensonge Romantique et Vérité Romanesque (1961), is a literary comment on the works of these great novelists. Until that time, Girard was a self-declared agnostic. As he researched the religious conversions of some of Dostoyevsky’s characters, he felt he had lived a similar experience, and converted to Christianity. Ever since, Girard has been a committed and practicing Roman Catholic."
Somebody has a piece up coming from a theological angle on this, and I have to say I find it fascinating, it makes me very interested in Girard's notion of sacrifice:
https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/rene-girard-and-the-eucharist-as-the-eschatological-sacrifice/
"René Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2010), 47. “Christianity has always known that this reconciliation was impossible: it is why Christ said he brought war not peace. Did Christianity predict its apocalyptic failure? A reasonable argument can be made that it did. This failure is simply the same thing as the end of the world. From this point of view, one could argue that the verse “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” is still too full of hope. The revelation has failed: in a certain manner it has not been heard.”
"In archaic rituals, individuality and differentiation are often suppressed. For example, Girard points out that in archaic rituals such as the Dionysiac bacchanal, the consummation of wine and other intoxicating substances “facilitate the abandonment of personal identities and help induce the hallucinatory atmosphere associated with a heightened practice of mimesis.”[35] The purpose of this is to unite people and bring about peace.[36]
[35] Michael Joseph Darcy, “René Girard, Sacrifice, and the Eucharist” (Duquesne University, 2016) 108–109. Here Darcy is referencing Girard’s analysis of the Dionysiac bacchanal found in Violence and the Sacred, 136.
[36] “The rite is not oriented towards violence, but toward peace” (René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory [Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977], 136)."
I should apologise here to Peter Gerdes, this article makes me understand a little better his frustration with the Continental philosophical approach as he sees it, but I think it's pretty clear that Girard is working as much off mystic theology as philosophy which of course is going to be both frustrating and aggravating to someone who wants to map philosophy out as a science like physics, in the same way as physics. Just the facts, ma'am!
I have to thank Scott, too, for introducing me to this man; as I said, I previously ignored him because I thought it was just more social science/social psychology trendy theory. If I go by this review of the 2009 collected interviews, Girard was indeed a committed Christian and a follower of apophatic theology:
https://ryanpflynn.medium.com/ren%C3%A9-girard-battling-to-the-end-quotes-891b535b43ed
"“God’s withdrawal is thus the passage in Jesus Christ from reciprocity to relationship, from proximity to distance… Christ questioned [God’s] silence on the cross, and then he himself imitated his Father’s withdrawal by joining him on the morning of his Resurrection. Christ saves humanity by ‘breaking his solar scepter.’ He withdraws at the very point when he could dominate. We in turn are thus required to experience the peril of the absence of God, the modern experience par excellence, because it is also a redemptive experience. To imitate Christ is to refuse to impose oneself as a model and to always effaced oneself before others. To imitate Christ is to do everything to avoid being imitated… The death of the gods, which so frightens Nietzsche, is simply the same thing as an essential withdrawal in which Christ asks us to see the new face of the divine. Mimetic theory has allowed us to conclude that the purpose of the Incarnation was to finish all religions, whose sacrificial crutches had become ineffective… The more God’s silence grows, the more dangerous violence becomes, as the vacuum is filled by purely human means though now devoid of the sacrificial mechanism. And, by the same token, the more holiness emerges as a distance from the divine.”
*Way* more interesting than the simplistic notion I had of "oh, yet another social philosopher yakking about evo-psych".
Thanks for the references. The Catholic symbols naturally lend themselves to Girard's ideas, but Girard also wrote that there must be a kind of “conversion experience,” which “always retains the form of the great religious experiences”; then he adds that “[t]his kind of experience can be found in the great oriental religions. But there the aim is to allow the individual to escape completely from the world and its cycles of violence by an absolute renunciation of all worldly concerns, a kind of living death”. Hinduism and Buddhism are most probably the “great oriental religions” he had in mind. Jean-Michel Oughourlian took-up Girard's ideas without having any religious affiliation as far as I know. I am also reminded that Merlin Donald promoted a mimetic theory of speech origins in his cognitive studies, a "watershed adaptation allowing humans to function as symbolic and cultural beings" with no mention of Girard.
If I understand correctly, Girard seems to use the frequency of single-victim myths to argue that it arises from deep-seeded aspect of human pyschology. But many of the examples he uses are from Indo-European cultures. Comparative mythologists will tell you that these myths are common and similar because they have the same proto-Indo-European ancestor. So it's not lots of different cultures sharing a common mythological trope, but lots of related cultures remembering a shared ancestral mythological trope.
Admittedly, that doesn't explain why the same trope is (seemingly) common among Semitic cultures, but one of the things I've learned recently is that ancient people moved around a *lot* more than I naively used to think. So maybe this reflects cultural trade or some older shared cultural ancestor.
That was pretty much my reaction. Specifically, the "Manu[s] and Yemo" creation myth that's thought to be the origin of the "creating the world from a primal sacrifice" trope. Odin killing Ymir and Romulus killing Remus are both accepted as descendants of the Manus and Yemo legend: Ymir is Yemo, as is Remus (via "Yemos" in Proto-Latin).
Semitic and other non-Indo-Europeans Middle Eastern cultures had a lot of contact with Indo-Europeans fairly early on, particularly Medes, Persians, and proto-Greeks, and there was definitely a ton of cross-pollination in both language and mythology over the millenia.
Ironically, the descent of multiple myths from a single proto-Indo-European myth suggests, that, while there wasn't an actual primal sacrifice, there must have been a first, primal, poet/priest/mythmaker/storyteller who came up with the _story_ in the first place... ( As opposed to multiple independent inventions if there were something in human psychology that made independent myths converge on one stable attractor )
That's a really good point. Even if there were multiple authors layering multiple story elements on top of one another to produce the final myth framework, that still means a small number of authors at most and each author is the originator of one or more major elements.
Many Thanks!
I really like Girard and I believe that his work is a big deal even though the rational conclusion from it is not what he believed and even thought he exaggerated a lot. He shows the social usefulness of religion, that means that religion is practiced because of its usefulness not because it is true. Christianity being a bit more true does not change this. But it is still a big deal - it is a religion that retains social usefulness but is closer to reality allowing for more rationality in mainstream discourse.
I don't know what you mean by Christianity being a bit more true. Sure, Jesus probably existed and probably got executed... but that's not really that impressive. For all we know, his disciples could have absolutely butchered his teachings.
By more true I meant that it reveals the scapegoat process, while other religions hide it. Here Girard insists on universality of that assertion but I am not so sure.
Yes, the final step of Girard's system is to paint Christianity as the ultimate antidote against this otherwise destabilizing process - even though by this late point he seems to concede that Christian message also ends up eating itself somehow.
Let's review the cycle: 1) innate capacity for desire => 2) mimetic desire (object copied from others) => 3) mimetic tension => 4) blame => 5) scapegoating => 6) catharsis.
Girard himself insists on how Cristianity (incidentally his own religion) powerfully counteracts step 5, by pointing out the truth that the victim is innocent. As Scott says: The Son of God brought from Heaven to Earth a single Word of the ineffable Divine speech, and that word was “VICTIM”.
So as part of steelmanning the man, it's interesting to see how most other successful religions appear to converge on trying to counteract the Girardian process. The interesting part is that they seem to tackle it at different parts of the cycle.
Early Buddhism is nothing if not a sustained attack on desire itself (see: skeleton meditation), so it goes straight for the root at step 1. Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism all insist on "love thy neighbor" (metta in Buddhist terms), which indirectly counteracts steps 3-4-5. Hinduism has a strong component of doing your own duty ("swadharma") while de-emphasizing personal desire ("nishkamya karma") or caring about what others want, which goes for step 2. Daoism is apparently unique in going straight for step 4; the Zhuang Zi just goes on and on presenting paradoxes that leave you confused about who is wrong or right, undermining any possibility of righteous blame.
I can't think of anything insightful to say about Islam at this point - maybe someone more familiar can help? Maybe the hugely legalistic hadith system is another way of keeping people well differentiated in their own lanes too?
Thought i’d point out that the canonical gospels including Luke were written in a form of ancient Greek, not Hebrew.
Sometimes reality is simple and we just make it complicated because we can't face the truth.
The question of our era is, in a post-Christian world, how do you handle the idea of groups of humans not being equal to each other?
After the disaster of Nazi ideology (a post-Christian belief system), and with the threat of communism (another post-Christian belief system) on the rise, something had to be done.
But we had no moral framework that could handle the issue.
So, we punted.
How did we solve this moral conundrum? We simply lied.
We told everyone that race was just skin deep. Those behavior patterns people had noticed between genetically similar groups and the differences in IQ? All caused by social factors. 100%. Nothing genetic. In fact, it was actually impossible for it be genetic because of [whatever excuse is popular]. Lucky for us!
The philosophical issue of equality between groups goes away if you just tell everyone that all groups are equal! Problem solved.
This worked for a while - several decades in fact. The downsides were massive damage to American cities, trillions lost on social programs that didn't work and a racial demographic change that we couldn't stop (on account that it would be racist).
But eventually, the lie catches up to you. The public started to demand answers to why equality wasn't happening. And then - boom - the Great Awokening.
The question now is what do we do about it?
I think those that make it complicated believe that a solution requires examination of why the belief in equality came into being, why and how it's been sustained. That is, the idea of equality is a symptom, not the first problem as it is to you.
The problem is that this nation was founded on this very lie.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Obviously the founding fathers weren't naive enough to actually believe this, considering they didn't even give all men the right to vote. Regardless, the sentiment persisted, and it ultimately lead to this mess.
But what should we do about it? In my opinion, nothing. Nothing more than what we're already doing, anyways. We're already approaching a turning point in human history. And with it will come a paradigm shift. We can only hope that things change for the better.
"We're already approaching a turning point in human history. And with it will come a paradigm shift."
What do you have in mind?
( Personally, I suspect that AI is in the process of getting successful enough to create large changes - but technical projects can always fail, and AI _does_ have a history of hype... )
It's mostly just that things are looking pretty bleak for humanity right now. As you said, AI is the biggest threat. Assuming they keep improving, AIs will heavily disrupt modern society through its ability to heavily optimize processes, removing a lot of slack from society (see Scott's old post for why that's bad for humans: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditations-on-moloch#III_ ). Of course, there's also always the chance that they go rogue and try to kill humans for any number of reasons. They'd need to be pretty intelligent to pull it off, but it seems exceeding likely that even a non-sentient AI can do some major damage. And if anyone's stupid enough to make a *sentient* super-intelligence, it will certainly remove humanity from the face of the Earth, even if it does love us.
Then there's also the fact that we're living through a sixth mass extinction event, and climate change (assuming it isn't mitigated) will cause a migration crisis and resource shortages, which then have the potential to further exacerbate tensions between global powers, who all have nukes... You get the idea.
If humanity does end up surviving all of that, things are going to end up looking very, very different. Humans have a habit of becoming much more pragmatic when it is required of them.
Many Thanks!
Capitalism also heavily disrupted modern society and is all about optimizing processes and removing slack, and yet here we are.
the reason why we believe all men are equal is because the alternative way ends up being "some men are masters, some men are slaves." You can couch it in things like IQ, as if the lot of you wouldn't cry if you were told "no, your IQ is too low for a masters degree, why not run a plumbing business instead?" but its always a temptation to use science as a rubber stamp God.
the sins of equality are light compared to that. A lot of people aren't honest about their capacity for evil, and couch it in good.
But does anyone *actually* believe that all people are equal? People clearly place different value on different lives, and no one seems to have any problem with people having widely different life outcomes depending on said value (except communists, of course). Even you seem to imply that plumbers are lesser than people with college educations...
Also, that's how master's degrees are supposed to work. They exist to signify mastery, as its name implies. If anyone was able to earn one, that would defeat their entire purpose.
the plumber and master's degree things are to show that the people holding those views expect to be the rulers, not the ones ruled or limited. its a good exercise to think of being jailed in the prison you build for others.
as for value yes we are all equal simply to protect one another. again, masters and slaves, and it is just as easy to send intellectuals to the gulag as laborers. or to the noose. Equality will create far less evil than otherwise; men are more likely to enslave than forbear each other's weaknesses.
I mean, literally "all people are equal"? I'd say vast majority of people doesn't, some do but they're kind of extreme. The whole "IQ is fake" thing is really unconvincing, obviously intelligence is a thing. But "people are unequal in predictable ways that correlate with observable somatic characteristics" is a much, much stronger claim, and much more problematic. Without it you have a simple policy: *treat* everyone as equal, give them the same opportunities, and see who comes out on top. No need to give anyone special status. If they're better (morally or intellectually), it'll be self-evident.
The second Word is INFINITE.
And Michael Lewis is His prophet?
I AM its prophet, for I am the Truth and the Truth is INFINITE! Actually, you are the Truth also, and so is everyone, Infinitism is a massively distributed religion.
Scott sorry if my earlier remark sounded like I was taking a shot at you, I meant Girard but realize I was very unclear. I appreciate how you reviewed it.
Re the first step in Girard's process:
"Most (all?) human desire is mimetic, ie based on copying other people’s desires. The Bible warns against coveting your neighbor’s stuff, because it knows people’s natural tendencies run that direction. It’s not that your neighbor has particularly good stuff. It’s that you want it because it’s your neighbor’s. Think of two children playing in a room full of toys. One child picks up Toy #368 and starts playing with it. Then the other child tries to take it, ignoring all the hundreds of other toys available. It’s valuable because someone else wants it."
There are at least three possibilities:
1) Yeah, some of this is accurate as it stands
2) Some human desires, "hunger and thirst and venery" are rooted in biology and would exist even if there were no one nearby to copy
3) Copying can sometimes occur without conflict. A child picking up Toy #368 makes Toy #368's characteristics more salient to child #2. If there happen to be two copies of it, child #2 may pick up copy #2. Not all goods are rivalrous or in short supply. The adult version of this can be "adopting best practices" (or, if someone insists on a negative spin, "cultural appropriation").
I too am skeptical of the whole scapegoating thing. If this were a common occurence in the ancient world, why is it so hard to conceptualize how and why it all worked, and why arent' modern examples more prevalent?
My intuition here is that what Scott/Girard are describing as the single-victim-process is actually just a normal conflict resolution process that involves mythmaking between different factions.
So, to posit an example: take some powerful authority figure like a king or a high priest, and let's say a coalition forms in opposition to the king. Some of them have what they believe are legitimate grievances against the king and others just want to usurp his power. They kill the king and one of their number assumes power. Naturally, the king's loyal supporters and friends are outraged and demand justice. They will likely be pushing narratives about how the king was a swell guy and didn't deserve to be offed in order to rally people who were on the fence to their side. Meanwhile, the new ruling faction will be doing the opposite: they'll be demonizing the king to anyone who will listen. To solidify the new ruling faction's grip on power and avoid a counter-coup or civil war, they strike a deal with the old ruling faction, and maybe one concession they make is to the other side's narrative: actually, the dead king was a pretty swell dude. Or he sacrificed himself so that a new regime could be born peacefully and lead us to an exciting new future, and whatever other kind of crap might be necessary to placate the losers.
In other words, I suspect that if the phenomenon Girard is describing here is real, then what's actually going on is that people are constructing myths about some event after the fact to hide or avoid confronting that it was just another case of "the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must."
"In other words, I suspect that if the phenomenon Girard is describing here is real, then what's actually going on is that people are constructing myths about some event after the fact to hide or avoid confronting that it was just another case of "the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must."
The explanation even some Roman writers gave about the 'deification' of Romulus; no, he wasn't taken up to heaven and the gods, but he was assassinated by senators and his body hidden and they lied about "so he disappeared in a cloud and went to the gods, honest, would we lie to you?"
"After a reign of thirty-seven years, Romulus is said to have disappeared in a whirlwind during a sudden and violent storm, as he was reviewing his troops on the Campus Martius. Livy says that Romulus was either murdered by the senators, torn apart out of jealousy, or was raised to heaven by Mars, god of war. Livy believes the last theory regarding the legendary king's death, as it allows the Romans to believe that the gods are on their side, a reason for them to continue expansion under Romulus' name."
Livy, History of Rome:
"After these immortal achievements, Romulus held a review of his army at the ‘Caprae Palus’ in the Campus Martius. A violent thunder storm suddenly arose and enveloped the king in so dense a cloud that he was quite invisible to the assembly. From that hour Romulus was no longer seen on earth. When the fears of the Roman youth were allayed by the return of bright, calm sun-shine after such fearful weather, they saw that the royal seat was vacant. Whilst they fully believed the assertion of the Senators, who had been standing close to him, that he had been snatched away to heaven by a whirlwind, still, like men suddenly bereaved, fear and grief kept them for some time speechless. At length, after a few had taken the initiative, the whole of those present hailed Romulus as ‘a god, the son of a god, the King and Father of the City of Rome.’ They put up supplications for his grace and favour, and prayed that he would be propitious to his children and save and protect them. I believe, however, that even then there were some who secretly hinted that he had been torn limb from limb by the senators - a tradition to this effect, though certainly a very dim one, has filtered down to us. The other, which I follow, has been the prevailing one, due, no doubt, to the admiration felt for the man and the apprehensions excited by his disappearance. This generally accepted belief was strengthened by one man's clever device. The tradition runs that Proculus Julius, a man whose authority had weight in matters of even the gravest importance, seeing how deeply the community felt the loss of the king, and how incensed they were against the senators, came forward into the assembly and said: ‘Quirites! at break of dawn, to-day, the Father of this City suddenly descended from heaven and appeared to me. Whilst, thrilled with awe, I stood rapt before him in deepest reverence, praying that I might be pardoned for gazing upon him, ‘Go,’ said he, ‘tell the Romans that it is the will of heaven that my Rome should be the head of all the world. Let them henceforth cultivate the arts of war, and let them know assuredly, and hand down the knowledge to posterity, that no human might can withstand the arms of Rome.’’ It is marvellous what credit was given to this man's story, and how the grief of the people and the army was soothed by the belief which had been created in the immortality of Romulus."
So I was right, then. Good, I'm glad we got this pesky Girard problem solved. :)
I think Girard would agree, but that the interesting point is that the victim - formerly the scorned, the shameful, the wicked, the cause of all strife and evil - is then deified and glorified *after* sacrifice/execution. Why do we do that? Romulus is hated by his political rivals and then murdered by them; why is he then declared Father of the City and a god? Livy's explanation is that the people *needed* that comfort, and in order to prevent further violence and breakdown of order, someone in authority stepped forward to say he had seen the new god.
Girard could see there that the act of violence - of scapegoating - acted in fact as a unifying deed, to confirm the Romans in their belief as their destiny to be a conquering force, and imposed order and peace. So the sacrifice *worked*, and the envy of the senators was transformed into something that broke - for a while - the mimesis, so that desire for taking the goods of one's neighbour was quenched.
Of course, then the Romans went off and took *other* people's goods, but the civic peace was obtained and the envy burned up, as it were. By a royal and holy sacrificial victim.
Right, but consider that after a 37 year reign, you're not going to be able to convince anyone Romulus was actually a cruel tyrant the whole time and his cruel death was deserved. That dog just won't hunt, so you have to fall back on assigning a sort of meaning to his life/death that it didn't actually have.
If I'm reading Scott's review correctly, Girard is saying that scapegoats serve to defuse tensions between different factions or individuals that exist due to mimetic rivalry, but in this case at least, Romulus cannot be said to be a scapegoat. He had what other people wanted, namely wealth and power, and when that was forcibly taken from him, the myth making went into overdrive to preserve the social fabric. That's just a different scenario than what Girard is describing, I would say. I guess my contention, which I can't prove, is that the Romulus scenario is probably the much more common than what Girard is describing.
Well, Romulus has become the object of envy and emulation; the senators want what he has but can't get it because of course only one person can be the king. So that's the mimetic desire at work to cause trouble: if they were content to be his inferiors, they wouldn't have worked to take away from him what he possessed. In a sense, Romulus is 'blameworthy' because he has made himself such a target and has accumulated so much power (and he's not a stainless personality, from the killing of his own brother to the plotting to carry off the Sabine women to inviting in all the dispossessed to join the fledgling colony of Rome, he has accrued a lot of unrighteousness).
Hailing him as a divinity is the way then to expiate (or hide) their own guilt and preserve the social order, as you say. And this divinisation can only safely be done *after* his murder. So he also acts as the ritual sacrificial victim between men and the gods.
Yes, I do think mimetic desire is a useful concept. However, in Girard's formula, the killing of the scapegoat is supposed to defuse the conflicts mimetic desire creates, but that's the part I think is contestible. That's not what happens here, though; the killing of the king is what inflames tensions and threatens the social fabric in the first place. The post hoc myths they attribute to the king and his life/death are what actually defuses the conflict, not the killing itself.
Plus, as I alluded to before, a scapegoat can be chosen almost at random, because the purpose is to foist blame on someone who can't defend themselves. Romulus is hardly a random person. He was killed specifically for the power and position he possessed.
People are getting very bogged down in arguments of definition over the word “woke” rather than focusing on the profound cultural shift that’s happened over the past couple decades, which is the pivot from descriptive postmodernism to authoritarian postmodernism. You see this in thinkers like Foucault being interesting in describing Hegelian master-slave dialectics in contrast to the contemporary turn to dismantling Hegelian master-slave dialectics. 1960’s era Critical Theory was descriptive postmodernism, whereas things like Critical Fat Studies / Critical Race Theory / Critical Gender Studies all fall into the authoritarian postmodern camp.
Foucault was interested in the way that power and knowledge feedback into each other. It took Foucault hundreds of pages to say what Yudowsky would summarize as “The map is not the territory.” Foucault argues that the map is produced by the people in power and explores the ways that language and institutions shape our maps. This is descriptive postmodernism.
The recent iterations of Critical X Theory agree that the map is not the territory, but the map produced by the people in academia is the morally correct map, and asking about facts (the territory) is a weapon of the cishet-white-supremacist patriarchy (the masters), and if you don’t follow the morally correct map, then you aren’t factually false, you’re morally evil. It becomes a moral duty to replace the map produced by the people in power with the map produced by liberal arts professors/activists, and questioning this new map is “perpetrating harm.” This is authoritarian postmodernism. You can call that cultural turn “woke” if you want.
A couple quotes from the review that stood out to me:
> If you’re concerned about the influence of wokeness on society, you should be more interested in things like…anti-free-speech policies, journals refusing to publish politically incorrect scientific results, or colleges forcing students to take diversity classes
Agreed. Descriptive postmodernism is an exploration of the ways that subtle things like language shape our maps. Authoritarian postmodernism is saying, “You will use the the language I want you to use or I’m going to punish you.”
> It believes that social systems must be seen through the lens of oppressors persecuting victims, and all political positions must be reduced to siding with victims as much as possible.
Yes, we aren’t just describing these systems as a scientist would, but exploiting them as an engineer would. This is the transition from a theoretical description of social systems to an authoritarian version of postmodernism that applies these observations.
I want to separate my claim from another claim that is often made about wokeness: that it is nothing but a bid for power. I think this claim is orthogonal from what I am saying here about the authoritarian nature of it. It’s possible you could be woke and be genuinely concerned about the things you’re saying, or you could also be doing it as a bid for power. Surely there are some people in the social justice movement who are genuinely trying to make the world better and surely there are grifters just like in every movement. There have been a lot of altruistic, goodhearted people in the history of the world who thought authoritarianism would make things better. If you genuinely believed that anyone who holds different beliefs than you was causing harm you might get feisty too.
The complete obliteration of the professor/activist divide is a major feature of the shift you are mentioning, methinks. It is nowadays expected and nearly demanded that members of academia be active in the politically preapproved manners and that doing so is pretty much a prerequisite for the production of valid ("morally correct") knowledge.
Agreed. I googled "English professor tenure track hiring" and clicked on the first one I found at NYU. [https://as.nyu.edu/departments/english/employment1.html]
It says this in the requirements, “We request that candidates include in their cover letter information about how they have contributed to the building of a broadly inclusive educational environment and how they imagine doing so at NYU.”
On the surface, I think “building of a broadly inclusive educational environment” sounds like a great thing. In practice, it means that not only must you subscribe to a very ideologically specific set of beliefs, but also that you must be able to show real world activism based on those beliefs.
Many Thanks! That is excellent evidence for how the ideological monoculture is being enforced.
I am dubious about engaging the issue of woke-ness from such lofty heights.
A great elucidation of cancel culture comes from Lukianoff and Schlott (The cancelling of the American Mind). It is the product of decades of ground level observations, and makes it abundantly clear that mob violence in many forms underly the changes that you state have gone through “normal liberal procedures” . To actually work, these depend on the type of free debate that cancel culture is so successful at undermining. If you don’t agree with the term mob violence, I encourage you to explore the examples they give and come up with a better term.
They also point to factors that go beyond the dynamic of the mob to additional contributing psycho-social factors, some of which are new.
Of course ideology also enters the picture, and you could get to myth from there, but here I would say that caring for victims is not the central issue, it is what constitutes victimhood that has been redefined.
To the idea of the sacrificed body I add the Indian notion of the universe as a sacrifice - maybe the highest manifestation of these types of myths.
That very ending caption, "These are among the many questions of mine that ISSFLL fails to answer"... that reminded me of the whole "mystery as the point" thing. Almost too big for a trope, like a meta-trope (yeah yeah INB4...)
The narrow version is when Yudkowsky noticed people "worshipping their own ignorance", and the broader version is... ahh I don't have a really-coherent paragraph here (yet?), but y'know how some of the best Art is like "in touch with the great mystery" or "the Universe" or "the void" or whatever? That, that thing. I hereby point at that and say "perhaps related?" without answering that question (yeah yeah INB4...)
A final note:
>be me
>ctrl-F "Thiel"
>no results in article
IIRC "Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World" is supposed to be a more in-depth work by Girard on this topic? Haven't really read it, but maybe it answers (or semi-answers) the lingering questions.
Girard's theories fundamentally don't make sense. Weaker versions of mimetic theory do, but are better spelled out by cultural evolutionists (Heyes, Henrich, etc). I'm not sure if the scapegoat mechanism makes sense at all.
However, Girard's readings of literature and myth are often very interesting. At his best, he makes the dynamics of mimetic rivalry and the human propensity to imitate more salient. I think that's useful and have put it to use in the Shakespeare debate and reflections on Covid:
https://www.classicalfuturist.com/p/most-people-are-other-people
https://calebontiveros.substack.com/p/girardian-views-of-the-american-pandemic
Great review! Extra virtue points for not strawmanning wokeness. I think you you've highlighted most of the issues with author's reasoning very well.
However, there is one that you didn't mention. How does the initial transition from mimetic desire to victimization even supposed to work?
Sure, people do tend to want stuff other people want. Does this lead to constant war of all vs all? Unless you are very generous with your definition of "war", so that it included any kind of competition between individuals - not really. But also, why would victimization help alleviate the mimetic desire? Okay, we've expelled a person. How is it supposed to prevent me from wanting stuff that my neighbour has?
And society isn't build as a result of the lack of mimetic desire. Even if we accept
the whole "status framing" - it's the opposite. Our civilization is founded on these silly status games. It exploits and perpetrate the desire of things other people agree are worth desiring. And yes some people can feel status boost through lowering status of others or just bullying the people with lowest status, but it's part of the vicious cycle, not an escape from it.
I haven't read Girard's book at all, just comments on it from other sites, but the sense I get is that Girard posits mimetic desire as somehow *flattening* society (which, after all, is built on differentiation) - if everybody wants the same thing, and is trying to get the same thing, this builds up tension. If we're no longer individuals but a glob of clones all striving to get the same status/item/wealth/whatever, then society breaks down.
See this complaint from the period of early Westernisation in Japan:
"Everyone has forgotten the righteous way. Now everyone is working for profit.... In the villagers we now have hairdressers and public baths. If you see houses you see flutes, shamisen and drums on display. Those living in rented houses, the landless and even servants have haori, umbrellas, tabi and clogs. When you see people on their way to the temple, they seem better dressed than their superiors."
That last bit - "people seem better dressed than their superiors" - is the mainspring of the tension. You can't tell where people 'belong', Jack is as good as his master, there is mixing and confusion. People that want and can't get, and people that had and now have lost, in the great equalisation of all the classes, are unhappy and aggrieved. Mob mentality develops.
Something has to give.
And by directing that energy onto the victim, the scapegoat - be it an internal enemy or someone deemed an outsider, a bearer of bad luck or actively malicious - the society 'drives out' the elements they consider sinful or unnatural or causing the disturbance. Violence is catharsis, and in the wake of catharsis is unity and identification with the common good: we have all acted together to do the right thing, we have done our duty, in this moment we are no longer envious of one another or striving to have more than we should.
It doesn't last, of course, because the same drives about "I want! I want!" are still present and start up again. Then people look back to the moment of unity with nostalgia, and even reverence (think of the way the British invoke 'the spirit of the Blitz') as a time of 'when all was as it should be' and that becomes easy to put it on a pedestal, and even treat the victims as somehow holy or at least possessing mana; something that is taboo can be harmful or beneficial, but it is marked out as possessing or being involved with spiritual power:
https://anthropology.iresearchnet.com/mana/
> the sense I get is that Girard posits mimetic desire as somehow *flattening* society
Yes this is the socially conservative standard consequence of buying Girard's framework of memetic tension. Anything that keeps people well differentiated helps their desires from flattening into the same thing and precipitating a crisis. So bring on traditional gender roles, hereditary guilds, caste systems, etc.
I haven't heard the argument made, but modern society seems to find its own ways of segregating people into buckets too. Back in the 70s, if you were "punk" you were not copying the desires of "hippies" and vice-versa. Same with jocks vs nerds, liberals vs conservatives, queer vs straight, etc. So maybe a Girardian should also support modern subcultures.
And now that I think of it, the current social-media environment has to be the ultimate test of memetic tension. Here we are, with our hugely varied real-world jobs and identities, yet the moment we join social media, the hyperoptimized machine channels as much of it can of our capacity to desire into a single gamified system of dopamine rewards from likes, followers and replies. If there's a place where, to a first approximation, everyone wants the same, social media is it. So if we agree with the reports that the whole thing becoming seriously toxic, and undermining the mental health of a whole generation, I think that's score one for Girardian memetic tension actually being a thing.
Let's see if any global scapegoats emerge out of Twitter or TikTok!
Memetic tension is too big a thing (like gravity) to attribute to a single voice like Girard's. Accordingly, breaking or easing such tension can follow many trajectories -- not just the conservative gender norms, caste systems, etc. I can think of all sorts of ways the current "single rewards system" you point to could be turned on its head overnight, quite possibly toward greater individuality than ever before.
> I get is that Girard posits mimetic desire as somehow *flattening* society
I'm not sure the proposed cause and effect mechanics here makes sense. It's not that complex societies naturally tend to be without any hierarchies so that people need to express constant effort against egalitarian entropy in order for civilization to work. Or rather, it may *feel this way* if you a conservative/reactionary who lives in 20-21st century, observing all the advances of modernity, but it's historically false. It took a lot of effort to arrive to a more egalitarian equilibrium - not very stable one, mind you, and every step in this direction was blood difficult. On the other hand, it should also mean that there is nearly no tension in rigid class systems, which is very much not the case.
Closer to the truth would be to say that flatter societies produce more mimetic desire. But even it, to a huge degree, would be commiting the good old "I don't see X = X doesn't exist" mistake. Mimetic desire is *more noticable* in flatter societies because people have the ability to actually satisfy it, at least partually. It doesn't mean that previously people didn't want to be better dressed. Now they just can afford it.
> And by directing that energy onto the victim, the scapegoat - be it an internal enemy or someone deemed an outsider, a bearer of bad luck or actively malicious - the society 'drives out' the elements they consider sinful or unnatural or causing the disturbance.
Some people indeed tend to get catharsis from violence and feel better by bullying others. Lets even assume, for the sake of argument, that it's some universal drive inside our psyche. This doesn't actually mean that it's connected to mimetic desire in any way.
An example. People have desire to eat. But also to have fun. And you can't exactly substitute one for another. Now if you satisfy the one desire of a person, for some time they are going to be happy about it in the moment. But it doesn't mean that the other desire went away.
> It doesn't last, of course, because the same drives about "I want! I want!" are still present and start up again.
Or maybe they do not start again, they were not eased in any way, in the first place, just previously the people were busy with other stuff - satisfying their other desires, which made their overal wellbeing appear to be less bad. But this exact desire also has to be satisfied.
"Or rather, it may *feel this way* if you a conservative/reactionary who lives in 20-21st century, observing all the advances of modernity, but it's historically false."
Y'know, I don't recognise conservatism in this description, and I see a lot of liberal takes of this nature: "the right want to bring back feudalism!" sort of rhetoric. Some conservatives, or self-described rightists, may well want that. Some of us just want "Can we stick to two or a maximum of three pronouns for the next ten minutes, please, until I get used to the New Thing?"
Anyway, even in the most egalitarian society - one of the ideal hunter-gatherer tribes that just spend an hour getting enough food to live and then loll around in leisure the rest of the day, as we're told happened before Bad Old Agriculture took hold - some are going to have different skills and talents. Grug will be better at making pots than me, so Grug is the tribe's pot-maker. Mog is the best hunter. Sek is the best at finding berries.
Girard in a sense is going along with Maslow's Hierarchy (though I don't know if he was familiar with it as such, and if I never see that damn pyramid again I will die happy) - once our basic needs are fulfilled, we want more.
"According to Maslow (1943, 1954), human needs were arranged in a hierarchy, with physiological (survival) needs at the bottom, and the more creative and intellectually oriented ‘self-actualization’ needs at the top.
Maslow argued that survival needs must be satisfied before the individual can satisfy the higher needs. The higher up the hierarchy, the more difficult it is to satisfy the needs associated with that stage, because of the interpersonal and environmental barriers that inevitably frustrate us.
Higher needs become increasingly psychological and long-term rather than physiological and short-term, as in the lower survival-related needs.
1. Physiological needs are biological requirements for human survival, e.g., air, food, drink, shelter, clothing, warmth, sex, and sleep.
2. Safety needs – people want to experience order, predictability, and control in their lives.
3. Love and belongingness needs refers to a human emotional need for interpersonal relationships, affiliating, connectedness, and being part of a group.
4. Esteem needs are the fourth level in Maslow’s hierarchy and include self-worth, accomplishment, and respect.
5. Self-actualization needs are the highest level in Maslow’s hierarchy, and refer to the realization of a person’s potential, self-fulfillment, seeking personal growth, and peak experiences."
So what I am getting from what others are saying about Girard, is that past level 1 and 2, people start to experience new wants/desires. They look around, they see others doing/having/achieving. This becomes desirable.
Why does anyone in the tribe want to be chief, after all? Some certainly won't want to be and are happy in their position. But others will want to be, because they see the position as desirable, because they mimic "what do my neighbours and circle of relationship want and desire?". Others will see that Grug is admired for their skill in pot-making, and will absorb the idea that "to be admired is desirable". People will then try and have what others have, be that material or status levels.
That introduces the tension, because not everybody *can* be the most skilled pot-maker or the chief or what have you. Remember, we're not even talking about hierarchy here, we're talking about "everyone is a happy hunter-gatherer where nobody is better than anybody else and all the decisions are made by consensus sitting around and talking about it" - but people will still *want* admiration, respect, being liked, being popular, the attention, the preferential treatment and the rest of it.
Girard says we learn to desire by imitating others. I think he's on to something there. There are things I absolutely don't care a straw about, but I see others caring about them - because they're imitating desire of Be Like Kim Kardashian or Get On Reality TV Show or Fifteen Minutes of Fame. This has nothing to do with satisfying basic needs! I don't think there's an inherent evo-psych drive to Be Reality TV Star! But there *is* societal and cultural desire that we imbibe as to "this is what you should want".
"Some people indeed tend to get catharsis from violence and feel better by bullying others. Lets even assume, for the sake of argument, that it's some universal drive inside our psyche. "
It's not even about bullying. We do have a natural tendency, when things go wrong or seem to be going wrong, to look around for a reason. What is to blame? Who is to blame?
Look at the idea of structural racism. What or who is to blame there? Well, everyone, according to the first definition I pulled up:
https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/health-equity/what-structural-racism
"Structural racism refers to the totality of ways in which societies foster racial discrimination through mutually reinforcing systems of housing, education, employment, earnings, benefits, credit, media, health care and criminal justice. These patterns and practices in turn reinforce discriminatory beliefs, values and distribution of resources, according to Zinzi Bailey, ScD, MSPH, et al."
So, do we just shrug and say "Nothing to be done about that"? No, we don't get that option:
“The AMA recognizes that racism in its systemic, structural, institutional, and interpersonal forms is an urgent threat to public health, the advancement of health equity, and a barrier to excellence in the delivery of medical care. The AMA opposes all forms of racism. The AMA denounces police brutality and all forms of racially motivated violence. The AMA will actively work to dismantle racist and discriminatory policies and practices across all of health care.”
You see? There has to be Recognition of the problem. There has to be Action. Policies. Opposition to the Bad Thing. Actively working to dismantle.
Oh, and there are villains we can recognise!
"Policies, practices and norms created to maintain white supremacy are forms of structural racism, said Ruth Enid Zambrana, PhD, distinguished university professor and interim chair, Department of Women's Studies, director, Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity, and adjunct professor, family medicine, University of Maryland Baltimore School of Medicine."
All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God - I mean, perpetuating structural racism:
"“I think it was important for us to explicitly name and recognize that there was racism baked into our system, and it was accepted as normal. It wasn't just oh, it's baked in and we recognize, and we can do these things. It's accepted as normal. We can really have well-meaning liberal types, even people of color who could be perpetuating racism on a structural level, while aiming to quote, unquote reduce disparities.”
This doesn't have to be about "I enjoy bullying and violence". It can be about "Something is wrong, things are not as they should be, there is Evil out there and we must act to extirpate it".
Identify the White Supremacists and kick them out and make sure they are rendered powerless. That's catharsis. That's the ritual scapegoat which carries all our sins and unites us in common purpose.
> Y'know, I don't recognise conservatism in this description
You were the one who sent me the piece about Japan Westernization.
> I see a lot of liberal takes of this nature
Sure. My point wasn't that "Only conservatives worry over stuff". My point was that such worries are not justified when comming from conservatives.
> some are going to have different skills and talents. Grug will be better at making pots than me, so Grug is the tribe's pot-maker. Mog is the best hunter. Sek is the best at finding berries.
I agree.
> So what I am getting from what others are saying about Girard, is that past level 1 and 2, people start to experience new wants/desires. They look around, they see others doing/having/achieving. This becomes desirable.
With you so far.
> Girard says we learn to desire by imitating others.
To a significant degree, we do.
How is any of it relevant to scapegoating, though? You're just describing things that fit the framework of mimetic desire. But you do not address my critique, that there isn't actually any connection between it and scapegoating, that it can be just two completely unrelated mechanisms.
I feel like you were gesturing at this, Scott, with your comment about the blood of Christian children. There is an oft-repeated pattern in history that Jewish people end up the scapegoats for whenever the social fabric falls into disrepair.
This seems very relevant to the current conflict and protests throughout the world. For me at least this has been the final proof that woke-ism is morally bankrupt. If you wouldn't say "n****r" when referring to a Black person, or "f****t" when referring to a gay person, how is it OK to chant "from the river to the sea," when many Jewish people have explicitly said that they interpret this as a call for genocide? Instead, the woke mob mansplain that it means something else. That's not even relevant! Who cares if "f****t" literally means "a bundle of sticks?" The important thing is how it's interpreted by the Jewish community, you a**holes.
Anyway, what's happening now strikes me as another episode in the long running trope "Jews are to blame for all the world's problems, let's kill a few thousand or million of them, then we'll feel bad about it later" except now the Jews have nuclear weapons and the anger and tension have nowhere to go. Like you, I really don't know how this gets resolved, and feel apprehensive about the future of world peace. I think also there's a strong chance Trump gets re-elected in 2024.
In the last one month, more civilians (11000) died in Gaza than in the last one year in Ukraine. Are Palestinians the new Jews?
Half a million died in Syria, and no one marched to abolish the Syrian state. Heck, right now Sudan is worse then Gaza and seemingly no one has noticed
"People don’t use cancel culture to relieve mimetic tension - otherwise it would happen at times of mimetic tension, instead of whenever a celebrity is revealed to be bad."
I believe that one could make a credible case that we currently live in the most heightened time of mimetic tension in the history of mankind. At no point in history prior to the current moment were people actually able to tap into a 24/7 feed of what everyone they know and everyone they hear about on the media (also not a concept for most of human history!) is saying, doing and thinking.
The ability to tap into such a stream of information seems to me like something that would inordinately heighten how much we end up desiring things simply because "everyone else" seems to be desiring it. Or how we'd want to *be* like someone just because everyone else seems to want to be like them. "Influencer" has been the top most-desired profession for a while now, if I recall correctly.
I guess in this group of die-hard atheists, I have to be the one to state the obvious: Girard (the sincerely believing Catholic Christian) in fact *does* have a solution: repent and acknowledge Jesus as your Lord and Savior. The fact that rationalists find this so preposterous is just additional evidence for how uniquely bizarre Christianity is. Worse, it only works if everyone in society believes or pretends to believe. Wokeness is, indeed, what happens when concern for victims is separated from all the other Christian embroidery of humility, prayers, cathedrals and Popes. Girard's solution is for us to go back to believing the rest of the Christian story, which until the last hundred years most Westerners accepted as the background cost of ensuring civilization doesn't collapse.
I think as many as several people have tried becoming Christian and it hasn't solved wokeness.
The woke people becoming Christian might solve it (for some definition of Christian), but the woke people becoming liberal or Republican or Muslim or dead would also solve it. It doesn't seem that useful to note that we could stop a dangerous growing ideology if only everyone who held it converted to a different ideology.
What if we could engineer a Woke Pinocchio Virus that makes a person's nose grow 1/4" every time they say something woke?
Also, are we just going to ignore that even worse things happened under Christianity? Crusades, witch trials, inquisitions... There's no such thing as a religion of peace.
Even now we have stuff like the Budweiser cancellation, sorry "boycott", or DeSantis *explicitly* weaponizing government power to retaliate against criticism of government policy and being cheered on for it by all the people who supposedly support "free speech".
The problem with this is that god doesn’t exist and Jesus wasn’t his son. I couldn’t convert if I wanted to. An actual solution will be to find a replacement that doesn’t pin morality to factually incorrect underpinnings. Otherwise it’ll be just another matter of time until people realize the underpinnings are false and the morality has to be self-supporting again. Let’s just cut to the chase and pick a self-supporting morality that doesn’t rely on incorrect metaphysical claims.
I’m also deeply skeptical that Christianity is an antidote to victimhood gone overboard. Woke Christians are commonplace and the anti-woke comments in this thread don’t show much of the humility you tout. (Eg that you can’t understand why an atheist wouldn’t convert? Another below yours that claims Ukraine and Isreal have “Loser” mentalities? Not to mention the least-humble person, Trump.)
I haven't read Girard, but I like this idea. ~Everyday at work there's some problem, and after identifying the problem someone will often suggest a scapegoat. "Wayne must have taken it." (Even though we all know this is probably not the person to blame.) We have now 'assigned blame' and can get on with solving the problem. This is important because what we need to do is solve the problem. But as humans we somehow want to assign blame after identifying a problem. And using a known scapegoat let's us move past this step and get on with problem solving. Scapegoating is a time saver, we (mostly jokingly) agree on who's to blame and move on. (Why humans want to assign blame is perhaps a deep question.) The other type of problem at work is where person X comes up and says, "I broke this doing this." and you can get right into problem solving.
Oh, I really enjoyed the post too!
I figured it out when I saw this headline: “Ukraine says it has evidence of 109,000 Russian war crimes”.
You can say that *war* is a crime. But saying there are 100000 crimes is bureaucratic nonsense, done by a political movement that feels you win, not by winning, but by complaining.
This isn’t master morality v. slave morality. This is *Loser* morality. Good things and success are bad, and incompetence is good. There is no need for an oppressor; one’s personal incompetence and malfeasance is sufficient to gain the moral high ground.
So we have Israel and Hamas at war, but competing, not to kill each other, but to present an image of meekness and victimization to the world. We have a society where wealth is prima facie evidence of moral guilt.
Is it any wonder the world is insane, and on fire?
I think it's good to live in a society where gratuitous cruelty is discouraged. Even though, in the case of complicated conflicts like the two you mention, it is hard to figure out which cases are gratuitous cruelty and which are not and what path is best at discouraging gratuitous cruelty.
Encouraging incompetence isn't the same as discouraging gratuitous cruelty.
>This isn’t master morality v. slave morality.
The loser morality as you describe it comes from slave morality. If you operate under a moral system that makes losers winners, you're going to get more losing and complaining and incompetence.
A common mistake here is to believe that people are insincere and lying about or exaggerating their own weakness to gain an advantage. It's more insidious: most people don't want to admit doing this, so they'll internalize it and believe themselves pathetic.
If you want a principled explanation of why Christianity (in some form) got this right and woke gets it wrong, read https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/11/13/pluralism-or-magnanimity/index.html?ref=thediff.co
If you are looking for some more *ahem* intellectualy rigorous analysis of the Christianity --> modern morality topic, the historian Tom Holland has written a great and thoroughly readable book - Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_(Tom_Holland_book)
(no relation to the Spiderman, unfortunately)
There’s also Rodney Stark’s _The Triumph of Christianity_ which makes the same point, that even the people who claim to hate (or not care about) Christianity base their worldview of rights, empathy, morals and so on upon Christian foundations.
In prehistoric times mimetic imitation must have often taken the grizzly form of literally wanting a piece of an esteemed person, in the hope and belief of acquiring some of their good qualities, like a sort of souvenir. Even in relatively recent times one only has to think of saints' relics, which included body parts such as bones and vials of blood.
The class of scapegoat myths overlaps with and segues into those of challenges or ordeals, from which the hero emerges triumphant. Christ in the wilderness being tempted by Satan, which he successfully resisted, Christ on the cross and dead for three days thereafter before ascending to Heaven, Odin hanged on the tree Yggdrasil for nine days, until at last he sees and understands the runes below the murky water, etc
> God (here meaning literal God, exactly as the average churchgoer understands Him) tried to break the reign of Satan (here meaning metaphorical Satan, the single-victim process) over the Jewish people, by constantly providing them with examples of the single-victim process being bad and ensuring those examples were written up accurately.
The trials of Job is a good example of your point, quoted above (as best I can with this utterly crap and almost non-existent substack formatting facility!).
Job's material prosperity also provides a hint of envy, which is first cousin to mimetic imitation!
Satan is chatting with God and the topic of Job arises:
>
>
And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.
And the Lord said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?
Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, Doth Job fear God for nought? Hast not thou made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land.
But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face.
And the Lord said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand. So Satan went forth from the presence of the Lord. ..
The parable of the rat
According to podcast science (so it may be false, but this is a fairy tale anyway), if you give an unavoidable random stressor to a rat, it will develop heart disease. Given another rat to bite, however, it will not. This is what Girard perhaps didn't fully understand. There is a _nonconservative current_ of pain that flows into us like entropy from our environment. We must have a place to put that pain, but we cannot reverse the irreversible. The destruction, therefore, is either directed inward or outward. There is no alternative. What appear to be alternatives are merely various strategies to turn that entropy on ourselves or on others, or, perhaps some lucky few, at best, find hiding places in dark, cool environments to avoid it somewhat. But the fundamental law remains. And some rage entirely against the tyranny of pain, thereby embracing it, becoming organic matter burning itself alive because a fiery escape has its own appeal.
Or we could work together to stop the sources of that pain coming into us _and_ others around us; after all if we just reflect our crap onto others, eventually, they'll bite back. I was raised Catholic, and the sensible stuff in the Bible always sounded like various ways of Jesus telling us, "Hey, if you want Heaven, here's how you get it: help each other, work real hard at it; trust me, eventually, things will get better." We're doing OK at it, honestly, and I credit a lot of that to technological advancement. Still, politics, humanities, arts, economics, these are all evolving fields and I hope there are still ways to develop them all in tandem to advance humanist / "non-ecstatic" Christian values.
End of parable!!!
If you give a rat another rat to bite it will also have a companion, though, & and is not suffering the stress of solitude.
That's the right idea! _Healthy_ companionship closes off one channel of entropy / stress. We can often work together to find ways to close off others - many more humans are sheltered and fed than ever before, and even as an old-school Leftist I can certainly give capitalism some credit for that - but then new challenges arise as well. We need some degree of stress to stay sane, our minds and bodies were wired by evolution with various hormetic response mechanisms proportionate to natural variations. How we will get to not zero stress, but optimal eustress, is very much an open question to say the least, lol.
Have a nice one!
Here's a theory of the roots of wokeness: It's hard to be religious these days, because science provides such convincing alternatives to god-based explanations of how the universe works and how people work. And technology is becoming more and more able to do things we used to believe only people could do. But there's a need to be religious, so people seized on on a secular belief that was sort of like religion -- liberalism -- and pumped it up like a Macy's Parade float until it was huge and godlike. It now furnishes believers with a way to be seen as good and a guide to how to live, and has the delicious bonus feature of allowing people to hate and destroy outsiders, via cancellation, without felling as though they are being cruel.
Too simple?
might be too simple.
if you only view religion in external
terms maybe, but if you have ever or do believe, theres sort of an individual "conversation with God" that has little to do with group identity. people go on too much about the benefits of religion and not the persecution that comes if you truly believe. in the strongest case this is where heresy or sects come from; the individual versus the social edifice which often is intensely weak.
i think with wokeness there is no individual conversation; its truly external which is why despite all the noise it has little impact at stopping racism. there really isnt a core for the individual to talk with or commit to. Like the role of personal prayer over mandated performance; part of the religious turmoil in the 60s imo was that people hungered for a personal not group based religion.
i guess i mean wokeness is more an impersonal thing; it cant tell YOU how to be good any more than trump hatred has caused the democrats to know how to govern well; too outwards.
honestly i was thinking and i think wokeness is a nervous reaction to the info flood of modern culture. like we are bombarded with israel and hamas info but most people don't have info defenses to realize to ignore things they have little power to change or affects them in no discernable way. or they couldn't make meaningful changes anyway; most people arent oppressing others.
so they get flooded with constant five minute crises and need to react nervously, but then forget just as fast. you feel a flow and swim
with or against the current.
answer may be moving out of flood country though and disengaging from constant info streams.
The more compelling story is that Western thought including liberalism itself was derived from and within the Christian worldview (for example, Locke believed that all humans are equal because God made it so), and became secularized as the empirical sciences demystified the world, keeping many of the Christian tenets while God was phased out. Jesus' "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God" became Bernie's "billionaires shouldn't exist".
Secularization meant that spiritual equality no longer sufficed and had to turn into equality in the material world. Unlike spiritual equality, material equality has to run up against the fact that people are in fact different, meaning that we had to invent fictions like "race is a social construct and any differences in group outcomes is fully a consequence of injustice".
To specify, the creation and maintenance of those fictions (eg, needing to cancel anyone who'd attack them) is woke.
For the first time I received a substack refusal to post my comment with a red lettered demand to "please type a shorter comment".
I attempted to do so but still failed to meet the blog's criteria so instead I added an intro and outro and shared the comment on my own page.
I'm sure this will result in fewer readers but I've done my best and can't do any better.
Scott, I hope and ask that you at least read it. It's my attempt at an actual solution to pseudo-moralistic victimology run amok.
In a word it is a call for public conversations about all of the truths we dare not speak.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/we-all-know-this
My comment was too long for the algorithm so I had to post it on my own page but I guess it makes sense to post the first half so that readers can make an educated opinion about whether to read the rest of it.
Here's to hoping that the first half of the response is within the allotted character limit.
1.
"Someone with access to Heaven is going to have to give us a second divine Word."
I make no claim to being that person.
In fact I deny that such an individual is necessary.
The Torah (which I care enough about to have studied for sufficient decades to become an orthodox rabbi) says that God's Instruction is not in the heaven or across the sea but incredibly close to us - in our very mouths and hearts.
All that I am saying is what everybody already knows.
The Torah - and all righteous laws - demand that an individual who engages in some new form of socially dangerous activity be dealt with lest he infect others with "mimetic desires" who then go about doing likewise and in so doing, harm themselves and others.
Lacking human-instituted consequences The Torah isn't any kind of law at all but just a set of suggestions.
2.
When a single individual was found working on the Sabbath gathering sticks, nobody, including Moses had any idea what to do about it.
From Moses' perspective the whole thing was ridiculous. The weekend break from economic activity is *obviously* a good idea. And besides, hadn't he already shared God's Instruction not to covet your neighbor's life? Why would anyone violate the Sabbath just because this single moron did so? The Sabbath is *awesome*!
To you and I the social danger is obvious.
If this fellow were allowed to go on violating The Sacred Sabbath Rest then he would get richer, others *would* covet, and within a year "poof!" there goes the very concept of the weekend as all of mankind is once again reduced to inhumane, thoughtless slavery - just rats on a hamster wheel.
But Moses and Aaron were baffled. They had only recently delivered God’s Law and were at a loss about how to proceed when some fellow had idiotically violated it.
There's a paragraph break in Torah Scrolls at this point, likely intending to indicate the passage of time as Moses, Aaron and the congregation at large debate how to deal with The First Criminal.
After the break God arrives and tells Moses what to do.
Take him outside the camp and have the entire congregation stone him to death.
3.
Fast Forward 1,530 years.
Yehoshua of Natzeret (henceforth "Jesus") is making waves.
He's a simple fellow, of no great learning or parentage, certainly not any sort of god, and almost definitely a bastard.... continued here
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/we-all-know-this
agreed, it doesn't add much, but it does add a something. In the same way, anecdotal evidence is still evidence. Similar studies, somewhat tangent to Girardian ideas, are in the field of terror management theory. These investigators were able to test Becker's ideas, but, as you say, studies like this are difficult. I don't think that detracts from the ideas, and at least doesn't falsify them.
Seems silly to me to think of mimetic tension as the main force interfering with social bonds between people and social cohesion generally. Think about all the neighbors you have had, and all the neighbors your friends have had and talked about, and mentally list all the qualities neighbors can have that make you distrust or dislike them: The can be inconsiderate -- they play loud music late at night. They can be harsh and critical of you, complaining vociferously about small things you do. They can seem dangerous -- you can get glimpses of how they think and live that make you afraid they will rob you or attack you. They can be filthy and disgusting. They can be attractive and charming and flirtatious with your spouse, so that you fear you will lose your spouse to them. They can be needy and demanding, asking you frequently for little favors. They can be nosy. And, yes they can own such great stuff that you are chronically pained by jealousy. But the last reason seems to me both less common and less severe than other ways neighbors can make you unhappy, angry or worried.
I can't see an ounce of justification for pointing to jealousy as the main force that interferes with social bonds and makes people chronically angry and unhappy -- exact that there's a fancy, stylish phrase for jealousy: "mimetic tension." Maybe we just need some more stylish terms for all the other shit neighbors can do to spoil your day.
-filthy and disgusting neighbors -- Coprophilic Disaffiliation.
-needy and demanding: Philanthropic Pressor Stress
-seem like they might rob you or attack you: Thanatonic Encroachment Anxiety
Yes, well, Scott did basically agree: "Yeah, I think mostly crazy".
I think Girard is being remembered and somewhat reclaimed because the 1st step, what he called "mimetic desire", is a remarkable and under-appreciated insight. As others have said in this thread, it meshes really well with current theories of cultural evolution a la Henrich. Being wired to copy each other's desires (rather than just aping others' actions) may well be the force that got cultural evolution going in our species.
For anyone interested in a steelmanning of Girard, there's a guy called Jonathan Bi who seems to have made a bit of a career out of it. His explanations of this first step, and how it's significant, are very good.
Ted Gioia has a nice essay on his substack about using Girard-adjacent ideas to understand how cultural (and also economic) trends feed on themselves way beyond the point where they rationally make sense, which eventually provokes a strong opposite reaction. https://www.honest-broker.com/p/are-there-alternating-cycles-of-hot
The rest of the Girardian framework... I don't really follow. I think Scott himself in his blog(s) has given much more insightful descriptions of a whole variety of mechanisms of societal conflict, than this weird idea that "mimetic tension" is the universal culprit, and scapegoating the usual (but bad) solution.
>I think Girard is being remembered and somewhat reclaimed because the 1st step, what he called "mimetic desire", is a remarkable and under-appreciated insight.
Well - the insight's less remarkable in a book from the 90's if you consider that Yale prof of literature Harold Bloom published *The Anxiety of Influence" in 1973. "Bloom's central thesis is that poets are hindered in their creative process by the ambiguous relationship they necessarily maintain with precursor poets. While admitting the influence of extraliterary experience on every poet, he argues that "the poet in a poet" is inspired to write by reading another poet's poetry and will tend to produce work that is in danger of being derivative of existing poetry, and, therefore, weak. Because poets historically emphasize an original poetic vision in order to guarantee their survival into posterity, the influence of precursor poets inspires a sense of anxiety in living poets." There's a struggle between the yearning to *become* the admired poet and the horror of losing one's self.
Also, the desire to have and do what the other person is doing seems to me to be just one aspect of the sense of connection small children have with other children. If you show toddlers a video of another toddler crying they will grimace and may cry. Of course later in the day they may be smacking a peer whose toy they covet, and covet precisely because the peer had it. But the desire for the toy the other kid had chosen is also a sort of vote of confidence for the other kid. We are wired to feel a connection with other people. That plays out with all kinds of complications.
I dunno, my overall feeling about this book is that the author had some small but valid insights, which he pumped up in order to make his ideas seem more important. There is such a thing as mimetic tension, but it's not this whole new entity -- it's a problematic phenomena that arises because we naturally connect with other people, but also must maintain our sense of being a unique self. There is such a thing as a myth whose plot revolves around killing the poisonous person who is responsible for society’s problems, but most myths are not about that.
"Certainly things like this have happened. But they don’t seem to me to be the interesting essence of wokeness. If you’re concerned about the influence of wokeness on society, you should be more interested in things like affirmative action laws, anti-free-speech policies, journals refusing to publish politically incorrect scientific results, or colleges forcing students to take diversity classes. All those things get enacted slowly through normal liberal procedures, the opposite of mob violence. Does Girard have anything to say about them?"
All the things you mentioned did not get enacted slowly through normal liberal procedures, they are almost entirely the result of judicial decisions that create incentives for organizations to enact those policies outside of the normal "get democratic validation for this policy" procedure.
I just read Christopher Caldwell's The Age of Entitlement, and he makes a really compelling argument that the reason the issues you mentioned are so controversial and central to current controversies because they were never legislated or voted on.
>Okay, But This Is All Crazy, Right?
Yeah, I think mostly crazy.
Me too.
I had the strange thought that mimetic desire is a lot like the prediction market trope . Or sticking with the guy throwing hot dice in a craps game (until he doesn’t.)
If someone else shows an interest in some thing, is it not natural to think that maybe it’s something you missed? It has resonance in practical terms. We learn by imitation; no one squawks about that. I think, referring to this as desire obfuscates more than clarifies. Humans are very uncomfortable with their own discomfort so projection of one’s discomfort onto an external cause is clearly a thing.
If one were to drag Shakespeare into this, the line that comes to my mind is, “the fault ,dear Brutus, lies not in the stars but in ourselves that we are underlings“
I also couldn’t help thinking of an old prayer/ditty :
“God bless the squire and his relations,
And keep us in our proper stations.”
An accepted hierarchy can be very good for social cohesion.
Memetic tension is too big a thing (like gravity) to attribute to a single voice like Girard's. Accordingly, breaking or easing such tension can follow many trajectories -- not just the conservative gender norms, caste systems, etc. I can think of all sorts of ways the current "single rewards system" you point to could be turned on its head overnight, quite possibly toward greater individuality than ever before.
I’m not Girardian and not really a Christian either but I’m curious, Maybe some of his earlier books make his theory a bit clearer but it is not easy to handle. I find it’s a pity he got so much faith, he would have been possibly considered differently if he wasn’t so Christian, especially in France where the intelligentsia is really anti-christian.
I think I would divide what happens inside a western historically Christian society and the relation with the outside world even if is the same mechanism.
For the case on wokeness and racism. In our society, wokeness defends the victims, ok but racists do not perceive themselves as bullies or a sacrificial mob. They perceive themselves as victims as well. Racists will have arguments such as the invasion of foreigners taking their jobs, etc. So racists make foreigners a scapegoat and act by resentment. Wokeness makes racism a scapegoat and act by resentment. All in a victimization mimetic dynamic.
All sides are taken in loop of “undifferentiation” as Girard’s name it. That’s your stage 2. The war on all against all fuelled by resentment. The crisis can only be resolve by the sacrifice of a scapegoat if we keep in our ancestral violent ways. But our society tends to be less violent because, according to Girard, the infusion of Christ message of non-violence. So we stay stuck in that stage.
On the scapegoat mechanism, I would add our western society does not achieve a crisis resolution using sacrifice because it tends to move from verticality (god, king, country, family, etc.) toward more horizontality (democracy, state, justice, equality, openness, genders, etc.) In verticality, there is always someone higher or outside the community we could name as a scapegoat. In horizontality, nobody is really from the outside, people can be on the fringe or richer but that's possibly marginal compared to previous times. For instance, everyone in a state has access, in theory, to the same justice system preventing individuals to get immediate revenge, etc. So it become really hard to designate a true functioning scapegoat, and that’s not for lack of trying but still the crisis stays unresolved so the violence is deemed to escalade, that’s why Girard in his late work speaks about apocalypse.
The relative inside peace was and still is maintained by persistence in designating enemies/scapegoats on the outskirts of our society, for instance Russians, Muslims, China etc. and they are doing the same on their side. Outside, we make real wars in the name of victims making in our turn thousands of victims. Inside of historically christian society, we use a less powerful violence, a diffused violence, we make victims but the sacrifice is not as strong.
How I understand Girard’s view, there is only two solutions. To truly, faithfully I should say, embrace the victim defence and non-violent way of Christ, so conversion. Or the violence will escalade to extremes, the apocalypse. In his last book in French, he uses Clausewitz theory on war to argument that point. As the means to unchain violence globally have never been so destructive and as the inside divisions keeps getting stronger, if we persist in believing the antichrist disguised in Christ victim’s clothes, we are doomed for apocalypse.
That’s how I understand it.
> if everybody wants the same thing, and is trying to get the same thing, this builds up tension. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-i-saw-satan-fall-like/comment/43878793
For a capitalistic set of societies where trade is a fundamental fact of life - trade can only happen when there are differentiated needs and wants, and ideally specialization. I'll trade you my apples (which I have lots of and I'm good at growing efficiently) for your oranges (which you have lots of, etc...). If everyone is equally capable of making all things, and is equally looking to obtain exactly the same things, then trade can't happen and we're looking at zero-sum, war or other conflict.
It is insane to compare christianity to wokeism. Christ does not intercede for the victim, but for man. It is the supreme egualitarian regime, and its courtroom is conscience. Individual conscience. All responsability lies with the individual and its soul; not the other. Wokeism, being founded in materialistic marxism, is its opposite: Collective conscience, and all responsability lies with the collective and its power. That is why identitarism is ravaging: it relieves all 'guilty' from the individual and places it on the collective. This is satan: the biological status seeking machine that trumps conscience and rationalizes (the brightest light) all trought relativism. Woke (marxism) is the opposite of Awake (christianity). N1. The Gospel of Luke is written in greek, not hebrew. N2 Satan is 'the divider', not the accuser. The greek root indicates Satyro (half man, half beast) and the diabolo (di = 2, to shoot trought, to divide, as in dialogue (two persons exchange the logos (di.a.logos - wich is the root in greek and latin)). As you see, wokeism 'divides' by 'identity' (what is most false about humans) and christianity 'unites' by inviduality (soul), what is most true about humans.
> come on, the blood of Christian children isn’t even kosher
I was about to say, Christianity has this historical blind spot where slave morality or no, when there's a plague or something else bad on, a common response is to gather a mob and go against the local Jews. Some say it's been getting more intense again since October. As far as I can tell, this has never really solved a problem, unlike in the Oedipus case.
I just so happened to come across another reference to this quote today, in of all things a clip from the Street Fighter movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8DlZg5KPl8
"You still refuse to accept my godhood? Keep your own God! In fact, this might be a good time to pray to him! For I beheld Satan as he fell from Heaven! Like lightning!"
And because of the delivery, I think this quote is spoiled for me forever. :-)
Paraclete isn't ancient Greek for "Holy Spirit". That would be "pneuma to hagion", or other inflections. Literally "wind the holy" (the holy air/wind/breath). This is an absolutely crucial theologically distinction, since the only verses in the New Testament (AFAIK) which imply that the Holy Spirit is a person, other than later insertions, are those which call the paraclete a holy spirit. A paraclete would normally be a person. So whether you accept the Trinity and live, or deny it and are burnt alive, depends on whether you think "the paraclete the air the holy" means the paraclete is a manifestation or recipient of the holy spirit, or "is" the holy spirit.
IMHO the holy spirit is not a person, but in-spiration from God (literally, the holy breath), because that's the only similar concept found in the Old Testament. So I'd get burnt alive.
> All those things get enacted slowly through normal liberal procedures, the opposite of mob violence.
You sure?
I think both of Scott's biblical examples of the "single-victim process" don't quite fit upon closer examination.
Note that after the sailors draw lots and identify Jonah as the problem they don't rush to kill him rather they first ask him ask "...what is your business? Where have you come from? What is your country, and of what people are you?” (1:8). After the sailors learn Jonah is feeling from G-d's service they again consult him: “What must we do to you to make the sea calm around us?” (1:11). Jonah tells them this is all his fault and they have to throw him overboard. The sailors do not want to do this and indeed their first response is to try and make it back to land: "Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to regain the shore, but they could not, for the sea was growing more and more stormy about them" (1:13). When the sailors do finally throw Jonah overboard (as he requested) they first cry out to G-d: "...Do not hold us guilty of killing an innocent person! For You, O ETERNAL One, by Your will, have brought this about" (1:14). Of course Jonah then famously does not die. Instead he is released into G-d's custody by way of being swallowed by a large fish. Not only is this not sacrifice but it isn't exile, as Jonah was merely a passenger on a ship filled with presumably pagan strangers. But the more important point is that the mob is totally absent from this story! There is no turning of ire on to Jonah or release of social tension after Jonah is cast into the sea. The sailors are super reluctant. They don't want to kill Jonah and it's Jonah's idea to throw him overboard. The sailors actively see themselves as committing murder and G-d as forcing their hand. If you look through your six step breakdown of the "single-victim process" you'll see very few similarities between any details of the six steps and any details of the Jonah story.
As for Numbers 25, this example is a bit better because there is social tension and it does seem to go away with someone's death. The first important thing to note about this story is that there isn't one sinner but a whole plethora of them, as it says "...the menfolk profaned themselves..." (25:1) and "...Israel attached itself to Baal-peor" (25:3). This pisses G-d off so he tells Moses to gather the heads of the nations and go kill these people publicly. Moses gets some officers together and as he's giving instructions, one of the heads of the nation, the chief of the tribe of Simeon (25:14), grabs a Midianite women and goes to start sinning in front of everyone. This makes everyone start to cry in front of the "Tent of Meeting" except Phinehas who promptly follows the sinner and kills him; "then the plague against the Israelites was checked" (25:8). Is the death of this particular sinner solely responsible for the end of the plague? I think that would be a sloppy reading and much more likely it represents a turning point in the story where the Israelites are emboldened to start killing the sinners among them. The point is, that we know in this case what's causing the plague (lots of people sinning), and G-d gives clear instructions how to proceed (kill the sinners), so it stands to reason that the plague is ended by following G-d's instructions not by the first symbolic action of following G-d's instructions. Further, I would argue that there is once again no mob in this story. G-d gives instructions to kill some people, Moses begins assembling the relevant officers and then we hear about one guy, Phineas, taking action into his own hands (despite the inaction of the masses).
I think much of Scott's broader point about projecting the single-victim process into all pagan myths and denying it's existence in the bible may well be true but I do not think his biblical examples are necessarily the best ones. I should add I have not been able to think of any better biblical examples but would be interested to hear if others have.
*All quoted translations courtesy of Sefaria
Thank you for the overview.
The book seems like the 2nd blind wise man describing his part of the elephant to the other two.
My view on woke is far closer to Turchin's "popular immiseration" and "elite overproduction" - particularly the latter. In an era of ever greater concentration of power and wealth in the West, resulting in ever greater diminution of the middle class, there ways are found by which those desiring a position in said shrinking elite can achieve this status - outside of norms.
Cancel culture is perfect for this: taking down of incumbent elites even as it raises the profile of a few "influencers".
Ditto woke overall: where before success was a function of hard work or birth wealth or location etc - now it can be because corporate boards and industry executive populations lack <insert minority here>. If you aren't one of the accepted existing minorities - create yourself one!
Girard is correct about saying that mob mentality is the worst thing ever and society needs a course correction.
The solution is to simply have the solitary individual gun down the angry lynch mob. When NPCs are PUNISHED for behaving like animals, they will quickly learn to stop doing it.
In Francis Fukuyama's recent history of the world, he credits The Catholic Church for 'breaking the ties of kinship' in Western Civilization and thus essentially (paraphrasing wildly) creating the basis for a 'liberal society', one that sees past family, village, and country and essentially sees a global civilization. The universality of human dignity is the big idea of Christianity. The focus on the neighbor, the stranger was a revolutionary idea then, especially to the jews who had considered themselves a chosen people.
The immediate mechanism of maintaining group cohesion in small groups is the process of victimization of the stranger, the outcast, which had its weirdest manifestation in human sacrifice. I am not sure if tying so much to mimesis holds up, It makes more sense to see it as a bad way to maintain group cohesion. It is very weird that human sacrifice was so prevalent in ancient civilizations, and yet, it implies a very deep process that is universal to all of humanity, and in that sense, Girard may be right in pointing to an origin deeper than group cohesion, to the very means by which all humans develop.
Indicative of how widespread it was is the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham did not say, but hey we don't do that anymore!!! Human sacrifice was something that was abhorred by the Jews, the reason the Canaanites were so reviled was because they were Carthaginians, and followed Baal, a famous human sacrifice enjoyer. And yet he was willing to accede until he was stopped.
I think one way to see Girard's philosophy is through, this story of Abraham and Isaac which, set in the Old Testament, prefigures Christ's sacrifice which then vanquishes the whole possibility of human sacrifice.
What other religion has reformed all of humanity like that?
I am completely willing to believe the analysis (esp. since I haven't read the books!); I think I can add something to Gerard's issue.
The ancient Hebrew scapegoat ritual is to benefit the public (taking their sins away), not to punish the goat :). Easter's event is to benefit the public similarly, not to punish Jesus. Even throwing Jonah overboard wasn't because Jonah needed to be punished, but to save the sailors.
Woke actions focus on punishment. I saw this once, pre-woke, "It's not enough to go after rich white people. We need to target wealthy blacks, too." That is, it wasn't focusing on benefiting the poor, but punishing the rich. I think I see this a lot now that "woke" is a term. BLM wasn't interested in helping black crime victims. Trans are favored, but not if they want to detransition. Children in Gaza are worth championing, if their deaths can be blamed on Israelis -- that is, it's about "Israel bad" not "Palestine good."
This does seem more like punishing criminals, but the crime here isn't so much literal, physical crime, or even isms like racism, but success (as a group, not individually). It's well-known that Jews and Chinese experienced significant discrimination, but they often succeeded, so they're not favored. So it feels like sacrifice, not an attempt to justly punish criminals. I've heard this, that a white supremacist is not (just) someone who thinks whites are supreme, but anyone who benefits from white privilege. That includes Abraham Lincoln (who's not popular with that set), JFK, and young children innocent of isms.
One thing the ancient world had lots of was envy. Mostly we don't even think it any more. (If you're more successful than I, why not bust my butt and succeed as well, rather than tearing you down?) Woke feels more like a resurgence of this, because of its emphasis on punishing success rather than ameliorating failure.
Does this sound helpful?
"The 'two kids fighting over a toy' example is mine"? Do you realize that that is the oldest Girardian example in the book, going back decades?
I'm late to this comment party, but I have just finished reading the book so I’m going to chip in now in case anyone else is interested.
“It would help if Girard could come up with some specific way that wokeness went too far and became qualitatively different from the Christian imperative.” That’s a good point and Girard’s answer(s) in the book are, as Alexander points out, not terribly clear. I want to posit two better answers (using the premises of the book): (1) wokeness goes too far because it doesn’t see *why* the victim needs to be helped – because it is atheist and (2) wokeness goes too far because it insists on the subject being the victim. The two theories are perhaps connected by their nihilism. I’ll try to explain.
Theory (1). The pagan sacrifice of an innocent victim was terrible, but at least it pointed to divinity: it was a recognition that human desires are not ultimately reconcilable by humans alone; although it was a mistake to think that the temporary reconciliation resulting from a sacrifice demonstrated the divinity of the victim, it was a mistake that pointed to a deeper truth, namely that divinity is required for ultimate human reconciliation.
Woke makes the opposite mistake: it sees that the sacrificial victim is innocent and must be protected; it sees that killing anyone, whether the king or the outcast, is not going to reconcile humanity to itself. But it doesn’t have any alternative mechanism for the reconciliation of human desires. (Christianity provides the solution that our desires are to be mimetic of God’s desires, rather than of our neighbour’s: the Kingdom of God might be described as the state in which all desires are congruent, that only the best is desired for all.) We are still humans – we are still innately rivalrous in our desires – but now all we have are our desires to help the victims, each one of us trying to do so more abjectly or sincerely than our neighbour, but with no end to that rivalry – no resolution – being possible. Wokeness, on this theory, is essentially nihilism which, because it does not provide any ultimate answer to what does bring about human reconciliation, cannot sustain itself. It’s a zombie Christianity.
Theory (2). Assume that wokeness is all about victims: the lower and more despised/oppressed the victim, the better. But *you* are never the victim – there is always someone more victim-y than you. Assume also that sacrifice is still essential to the resolution of conflict and the salvation of the victim: isn’t the natural endpoint of wokeness a kind of self-sacrifice, a suicide by anyone who ranks higher (i.e. is more of an oppressor)? Pagan morality says that you must turn on the weak and sacrifice (e.g.) the beggar (as in the Apollonius of Tyana example); wokeness says you must turn on the strong and therefore sacrifice yourself; only Christianity says that no more sacrifice is required?