In Mimetic Theory

Doubles, Narcissists, Victims, and Philosophers: Truth and “After Truth” in Mimetic Theory Scott Cowdell Many factors contribute to today’s “after truth” situation. Regarding Brexit, for instance, when populist nationalistic myth trumped entrenched economic rationalism, one commentator points to non-serious Tory media tarts like Boris Johnson overshadowing more serious policy contributors from the political left.1 And, from this side of the ditch, Kurt Anderson addresses a cultural history of programmatic American self-delusion in his bestseller Fantasyland.2 He points to America’s early-modern origins in dreams of non- existent Eldorado and projects of religious extremism, to its subsequent tastes for hucksterism and fundamentalism, to its widespread preference for the pleasure principle over the reality principle and, notably, to the key contribution of today’s culturally relativistic left-wing intellectuals whom he considers to be “useful idiots”. All this adds up to what Anderson calls America’s “fantasy industrial complex”. And, wherever you look, social media is supplanting traditional curated media, privatizing the commons and edging out the truth. It creates disconnected echo chambers of invincible ignorance rather than the global unity that Mark Zuckerberg used to say he believed in. The English political theologian Adrian Pabst describes the ideal politician in this brave new world as ideas-free, preferring targeted messaging based on computer algorithms over debate.3 Part of the problem is surely just how human beings are. The Nobel Prize-winning Israeli experimental psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, has shown that many real-life decisions are approached non-rationally. We are prone to biases and unreliable heuristics, we resist thinking carefully and taking stock, and we are not good natural statisticians when assessing financial risks. Instead, our reason must contend with ill-suited mental habits formed in an evolutionary environment of scarcity and threat.4 Another part of the problem comes with late-modern cultural anxieties. Our loss of an authoritative past, an understandable present and any clear path to a worthwhile future leaves us prey both to dishonest nostalgia and threadbare futurism. We find ourselves in what the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, calls “the dark night of intelligence” and “the dark night of memory.”5 My Australian Girardian colleague Diego Bubbio identifies The Reverend Canon Professor Scott Cowdell is Research Professor in Public and Contextual Theology at Charles Sturt University, and Canon Theologian of the Canberra-Goulburn Anglican Diocese. This paper was presented at the July 2018 Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COVR) Conference, held at Regis University, Denver. today’s myth of personal autonomy as the truest root of these post-truth conditions, since Westerners now refuse to be beholden to anything objective,6 let alone authoritative. All these aspects of our “after truth” situation—be they historical and cultural, political and economic, or psychological and philosophical—are helpfully illuminated by mimetic theory. I will now offer some Girardian reflections on the dynamics of truth denial that confront us, and the vocation of truth telling that seems to elude us. I The mimetic condition shapes how we perceive the objects of our desire. Then, if we succumb to ontological sickness—to fixation on the model of our desire, hence perhaps to narcissism, and certainly to ressentiment—the truth of our condition and our awareness of victims undergoes further distortion. And we cannot escape this mimetic web of rivalry by recourse to reason.7 Instead, the only Girardian path out of today’s after-truth situation is, to paraphrase Bubbio, the arduous hermeneutical endeavour of distinguishing between logoi.8 Regarding mimesis and perception, Girard reveals in his first book how our model or mediator lights up the world for us by directing and supercharging our desire. In a 1978 interview for the Denver Quarterly, and regarding a novel that he later said could have been included in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Girard had this to say: “In certain twentieth- century works, and notably The Waves by Virginia Woolf, even the perception of ordinary objects is determined by the actual presence of a ‘more transcendental’ other, in the immediate vicinity of the perceiver.”9 This trend towards what we might call mimetic perspectivism leads for Girard to a “growing ‘paranoia’ of the Western personality, a paranoia that expresses itself very directly in the phenomenological subject’s desire and [yet] failure to found the entire world upon his own private perception.”10 Girard recognized this collapse into undifferentiation, mimetic doubling and nihilism in great literature of the modern West. In the early example of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, for instance, he observes the hierarchical orders of a pre-modern world, rooted in the false sacred, undergoing a collapse; Take but degree away, untune that string, 2 And hark, what discord follows! Each thing meets In mere oppugnancy: the hounded waters Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores, And make a sop of all this solid globe.11 This tendency marks the contentious equality of American democracy, too, as first described by Tocqueville.12 Girard also found it in modern apocalyptic tendencies that he associates with unrestrained mimetic rivalry, concluding in his book on Dostoyevsky that “nihilism is the source of all ideologies because it is the source of all the underground divisions and oppositions.”13 Later, in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, he discerned this nihilism in “the Kafkaesque rejection of all meaning.” For Girard, then, “what is frightening [today] is the conjunction of massive technical power and the spiritual surrender of nihilism. A panic-stricken refusal to glance, even furtively, in the only direction where meaning could still be found dominates our intellectual life.”14 Ontological sickness, which is regularly marked by narcissism and ressentiment, is at the heart of “after truth” phenomena such as “fake news” and “alternative facts.” And it is more widespread than simply the influence of Donald Trump, despite his having been persuasively diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder against the standard criteria of denial, rationalization, self-aggrandisement, blame shifting, egotism, entitlement, and an anxious or paranoid sense of self. Anyone who has had to work under a narcissist knows that truth is an early casualty, along with empathy. Girard, in an essay on the anti-hero, locates the roots of such self-deluding and other-deceiving pridefulness in an underlying sense of shame, and hence in combative opposition to the model-obstacle over whom the anti-hero secretly obsesses.15 Yet this mimetic condition does not just afflict troubled individuals. It is also a collective reality, well-represented among institutions, businesses, and churches.16 The same rivalrous mimetic dynamics are at work in the increasing radicalization of modern philosophy, analysed in Girardian terms by Stephen Gardner.17 Such rivalry also underpins developments in modern painting, according to the Australian art critic Sebastian Smee.18 So, truth must contend with rivalry and ressentiment in the realm of ideas and creativity as well. Bubbio describes such mimetic entrapment with reference to the Dosteyevskian underground, which Girard explores.19 He laments that “even philosophy and religion, like all other rivals, block one another’s path ‘just enough’ to prevent, mutually, access to truth; it is this that 3 produces cognitive nihilism, the ‘castration of meaning.’”20 For example, the scepticism that typifies our “after truth” condition is less about a justifiable intellectual scrupulousness and more about “a self-consuming disappointment that seeks world-consuming revenge,” as Stanley Cavell points out21—and as any fair-minded reader of Richard Dawkins’ angry tirades might conclude. It is also the case that our modern drive to ever-greater differentiation, in which consumer culture channels our desires in order to deflect and diffuse the escalation of rivalry, has implications for our opinions. As a wide range of fashion styles and a whole palette of body art are available to distract and differentiate us, so too a plethora of bespoke causes and obsessions can be cherry-picked from the blogsphere and its fantasy world of conspiracy theories. In this ready market for “fake news,” it does not matter that logically incompatible views are held, nor is it likely that anything so dreary as hard evidence could change anyone’s mind. It is the scapegoat mechanism, however, which minted the two-headed coin of religion and culture, that lies at the heart of what truth means and must not mean according to mimetic theory. In archaic situations, the stable, reliable, reasonable givenness of reality requires the mythological occulting of founding violence. With Judeo-Christian revelation, however, comes a more reliable access to truth, a more humane role for sacrifice, and hence an alarming opportunity to conceive and organize human affairs on a new foundation. In modern times, however, Girard warns of mythology’s return, with a renewed taste for scapegoating. He identifies a “phenomenon of nonritualized collective transference”, multiplying “scapegoats […] wherever human groups seek to lock themselves into a given identity— communal, local, national, ideological, racial, religious, and so on.”22 This is played

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