René Girard’s theories still explain the violence all around us
René Girard, the French-born scholar who died late last year, spent his career trying to understand what makes violence a chronic problem of human societies. While we might assume that violence stems from having vastly different points of view, Girard’s central insight is that violence actually grows from similarity.
His explanation, in a word, is imitation. Out of this insight, Girard spun a theory comprehending literature and religion, anthropology and international relations.
“When the whole world is globalized,” Girard said, “you’re going to be able to set fire to the whole thing with a single match.”
.. The book claimed that all the great novelists — in a tradition running from Cervantes through Dostoevsky to Proust — had made the same discovery: human beings, contrary to romantic myth, have no “authentic” core, no deep source of original, self-invented desire.
Our desires are borrowed from one another: I will desire what my models desire.
.. Girard took the final step in the construction of his theory in 1978 with the publication of a book named after a New Testament verse in which Jesus said he will reveal Things Hidden From the Foundation of the World. Its central argument is that Christianity completes what has already begun in the Hebrew Scriptures: the unveiling and disabling of the scapegoat mechanism on which all cultures had previously been based.