Repent for Lent: Renewing Our Minds with Memetic Theory – Original Sin
The human capacity to imitate exceeds that of any other species, and this is demonstrated by babies hours old mimicking the facial expressions or gestures of their parents. As we evolved into increasingly relational creatures, the way we learned from each other inevitably encompassed imitation not only of behaviors, but of desires and emotions.
This mimesis is not bad in itself; it builds bonds and relationships. But when we learn our desires by observing what others have or want, we can come into conflict if our desires cannot be shared (or if we do not know how to share). Our prehuman ancestors experienced the positive and negative emotions entwined with mimetic desire before language helped to make meaning of their confusion.
.. Imitation in the form of retaliation can destroy a group or community. But at some point various ancestors, converging upon someone among them… came together again and gained relief from the stress of conflict and violence. They killed or expelled this person.
.. Hominization, Girard theorizes, came with this discovery of this control mechanism – this scapegoating mechanism – that prevented the complete destruction of all against all. This violent origin of human civilization, the manifestation of negative mimesis pushed to its limit, is known in Girardian terms as “the founding murder” and may be analogous to the Christian concept of “the fall.”
.. If we recognize God as the perfect relationship of mutually giving and receiving love, without rivalry or violence, then to be made in God’s image is to be made for relationship. And that’s exactly what being a mimetic creature is!
.. if, as Girard says, human consciousness was formed by an act of violence, but the truly human one is the nonviolent Jesus, then we are not yet fully human. We are still in the process of being transformed. And part of that transformation comes from seeing that the way we have built unity since the dawn of civilization has left countless innocent victims in its wake. Our humanity deepens as our mechanism for social cohesion shifts from sacrifice to mercy. This can only happen when we recognize our victims for who they are rather than glorify our violence against them (as has been happening ever since the founding murder released a cathartic euphoria). And this recognition was made possible by God exposing himself not as the commander of our violence, but as its victim.
.. While a literal reading of scripture is incompatible with evolution, an understanding of mimetic theory shows that scripture itself is an evolution — a recording of humanity’s evolving understanding of God from violent to nonviolent. In Genesis, it appears that God expels humans from paradise; by the time we reach the Gospel of John we see that what we perceived as God’s wrath was really our own negative judgments rendering us unable to recognize God in the midst of us. As John 1:10 says, “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.” (I began to explore the consequences of our false judgments in light of Genesis 3 here. )