Mimetic Desire and the Scapegoat

The idea was named by René Girard, a French literary critic who in the twentieth century became an anthropologist and a Christian; as a theory it is young, as a fact about our species it is older than writing. Girard begins from a plain observation: we do not know by ourselves what we want, and we learn to want by watching someone else. A child is bored among its toys until another hand lifts one – and that one becomes the coveted thing. Desire is borrowed, and from this grows both culture and catastrophe: when two reach for the same object and it cannot be shared, the rivals grow ever more alike, until a whole community sinks into a crisis where all are identical and all are enemies. Archaic humanity stumbled on a way out that underlies every ancient religion on the planet. The disorder suddenly contracts onto one arbitrary victim – the scapegoat – and the shared killing restores peace. The victim is afterward divinized, because it gave the calm; the first gods, Girard says, are divinized scapegoats, and the first city stands on a buried brother's body. The mechanism works only while the crowd sincerely believes the victim is guilty. And here is the rupture that Paul preaches as the heart of his news: in Jerusalem the killed one spoke for himself, and the Gospel told the old story for the first time from the victim's side, calling the victim innocent and the mob guilty. Once exposed, sacred violence loses its power to heal. The West still lives off that exposure, and grows worse at living without it.