Mirroring

Why is it that rivals often come resemble each other?

We’re living a “Girardian moment”.

René Girard’s scapegoat theory is one of those things that is so simple it’s hard to think about. Like Martin Buber’s I & Thou / I-It contrast it’s a picture of the archetypal human dilemma that is so true, so elemental that our head hurts when we contemplate it. Here’s Girard-for-Dummies (which is definitely my speed):

• first off, human beings are all subject to a tendency toward coveting one another’s lives. Not just each other’s possessions and status and “style”—but each other’s very lives—the heart of a life, its desire. (see? I told you your head will hurt…)

• all children learn by imitating another’s desire—that is, if they notice another child wanting something, they mirror that wanting and suddenly find themselves wanting that very thing… (even when the toy they’re already holding is obviously a better toy!). (Putin and Ukraine?) But that’s how we learn: by imitating others—particularly in their desire. (head hurts even more all of a sudden…)

• the heart of all rivalry is desire—imitative desire—and rivalry can threaten to morph into murder (think Cain and Abel)… and all of human history with its perpetual war constitutes a contagion of rivalry resulting in its ultimate bitter fruit: murder.

• Rivalry can spread like a pandemic and threaten to completely unravel all bonds of love and affiliation—effectively ending the tribe, the nation, the family… and that contagion of viral rivalry always seeks a scapegoat—someone else to blame. (Think the Jews in Germany a hundred years ago…)

Girard goes on in his many books to elucidate this elegant and simple but head-hurting theory to explain many, if not all, social ills.

Well Herman’s theory is that we’re living a Girardian moment.

We’re about to see the “wild experiment” of American democracy meltdown in a contagion of violence and hatred that will seek a scapegoat. It’s inevitable. Just read your Greek mythology again. Read your history books. Read the Bible. What you’ll find is an unmistakeable pattern — the pattern that René Girard saw and was himself floored by. And that’s why he came to be converted to Christian faith—not one of the conventional social forms of Christendom (which have all the same features as other tribal societies) but a fresh understanding of what Jesus was all about.

And Jesus was all about willingly assuming the role of The Scapegoat.

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About “mirroring”.

Girard saw that this pattern of widespread rivalry and concomitant violence as something inevitable among beings who learn via imitation. That “mimetic desire” which leads to quarreling and fighting among little children is played out on a grand scale by adults… war, wars, and more wars. That imitative desire and intense rivalry results in a phenomenon that Girard called “mirroring”—when rivalry reaches is apogee (or nadir) and threatens to unglue everything, suddenly the rivals at the extremes come to resemble each other—to become mirror images of each other. And like a mirror image, they are opposites but linked at a fundamental level. In the mirror your left hand appears to be your right hand and vice versa. (What a political drama!)

If you apply this thinking (however bad your head is hurting by now) to our cultural moment, you will begin to have daylight dawning in that hurting head (and heart). Learn to empathize rather than default to scapegoating and you’ll be following Jesus, who said outrageous things like “love your enemies.”