"...I am down to my very last two Idols, and I do not think I can survive with only one!"
Here is a new idol for you, René Girard.
an excerpt:
firstthings.com
".... Since most human beings do not follow Jesus, scandals must happen (Matthew 18:7), proliferating in ways that ought to endanger the collective survival of the human race-for once we understand the terrifying power of escalating mimetic desire, no society seems capable of standing against it. And yet, though many societies perish, new societies manage to be born, and quite a few established societies manage to find ways to survive or regenerate. Some counterforce must be at work, not powerful enough to terminate scandals once and for all, and yet sufficient to moderate their impact and keep them under some control.
This counterforce is, I believe, the mythological scapegoat-the sacrificial victim of myth. When scandals proliferate, human beings become so obsessed with their rivals that they lose sight of the objects for which they compete and begin to focus angrily on one another. As the borrowing of the model's object shifts to the borrowing of the rival's hatred, acquisitive mimesis turns into a mimesis of antagonists. More and more individuals polarize against fewer and fewer enemies until, in the end, only one is left. Because everyone believes in the guilt of the last victim, they all turn against him-and since that victim is now isolated and helpless, they can do so with no danger of retaliation. As a result, no enemy remains for anybody in the community. Scandals evaporate and peace returns-for a while.
Society's preservation against the unlimited violence of scandals lies in the mimetic coalition against the single victim and its ensuing limited violence. The violent death of Jesus is, humanly speaking, an example of this strange process. Before it begins, Jesus warns his disciples (and especially Peter) that they will be "scandalized" by him (Mark 14:27). This use of skandalizein suggests that the mimetic force at work in the all-against-one violence is the same violence at work in mimetic rivalries between individuals. In preventing a riot and dispersing a crowd, the Crucifixion is an example of cathartic victimization. A fascinating detail in the gospel makes clear the cathartic effects of the mimetic murder-and allows us to distinguish them from the Crucifixion's Christian effects. At the end of his Passion account, Luke writes, "And Herod and Pilate became friends with each other that very day, for before this they had been at enmity with each other" (23:12). This reconciliation outwardly resembles Christian communion-since it originates in Jesus' death-and yet it has nothing to do with it. It is a cathartic effect rooted in the mimetic contagion.
Jesus' persecutors do not realize that they influence one another mimetically. Their ignorance does not cancel their responsibility, but it does lessen it: "Father, forgive them," Jesus cries, "for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). A parallel statement in Acts 3:17 shows that this must be interpreted literally. Peter ascribes to ignorance the behavior of the crowd and its leaders. His personal experience of the mimetic compulsion that possesses crowds prevents him from regarding himself immune to the violent contagion of victimization...."
and
anthropoetics.ucla.edu |
