Imagine a prehistorical time when a band of early homo sapiens committed an act of violence that resonated in such a powerful way that we still feel its effects hundreds of thousands of years later. This act of human sacrifice had a profound impact on the structure of the human psyche and how societies manage conflict. Such a belief is outlined by Rene Girard in his book Violence and the Sacred. His provocative theory is well-developed and, at the very least, plausible. Girard, however, runs into major problems when he tries to explain the disconnection between his theory and the social practices of humanity in the modern world.
Girard develops a hypothesis about the origin of human culture based on an unrecorded event that happened so far back in history that no one actually knows what or how it happened. He claims that an act of transgression, probably a murder, occurred within a community and the members of that community retaliated by committing acts of violence against members of the opposing faction. Think of a blood feud situation in which members of an organized crime family kill off members of an enemy family in retaliation for an act of violence committed against them. The cycle of retaliatory violence spiraled so far out of control that the survival of the band of humans was in jeopardy. Then somebody realized that the key to ending the feud would be to unite the opposing sides by having them team up together to perform a ritual sacrifice, one involving a human scapegoat. The community’s collective consciousness blended and was then directed towards the sacrificial victim, channeling the murderous energy into one common direction so that it no longer dispersed throughout the society.
Rene Girard traces the survival of this behavioral framework from prehistory into the so-called primitive societies of Africa and beyond. Mythologies were invented to explain the ceremonial killing and these myths eventually transformed into religions. As the human diaspora spread all over the globe, the diverse communities continued this ceremonial rite, taking it with them, and changing it according to their own needs and styles. Many tribes began substituting animals for human sacrifices and some abandoned the practice altogether. The ancient Greeks sublimated this ritual slaughter into tragedy and beyond that, traces of the ceremony still remain today in various forms like literature and political theory. This is a structural-functional sociological argument and the implication is that an act of violence is necessary to form tight community bonds and prevent the spread of cyclical violence throughout society.
Girard justifies his hypothesis by comparing the places where this rite of sacrifice has survived. He applies the framework of his description to tribes in Africa like the Dinka of what is now South Sudan and the Incwala of Swaziland. A mythology of the Tsimshian Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest is also analyzed. The idea is that all of these rituals and myths are ancestrally related to the one original human sacrifice and the differences in detail are a result of cultural evolution. Up to this point this is a very tightly wound and well-reasoned theory which gets backed up with fairly legitimate evidence.
Girard builds on his hypothesis by analyzing mimetic desire as a motivational force. The tragedy of Oedipus and Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the Oedipus complex exemplify what he means. Humans learn by imitating others; first and foremost, men learn by imitating their fathers. A young boy desires to be like his father but he also builds his individuality by desiring to be different from his father. This is a double bind and the resolution of this conflict is necessary for the individual to effectively grow up and adjust to society. One of the ways he wishes to be like his father is in the possession of his mother. Therefore competition for the mother leads to conflict with the father which is the source of violence in the human individual. Sex and violence, being two forms of libidinal energy, need to be suppressed and controlled through social taboos to prevent a person from becoming a danger to himself or others. Incest taboos became a way of controlling human instincts and that is why religious practice is partially characterized by prohibitions. Girard’s contention is that religious myth and ritual are necessary to keep a society from self-destructing.
The breaking of taboos can be dangerous and people who do so can be elevated as kings, sometimes later to be sacrificed, or degraded as marginalized individuals. Since the goal of sacrifice is the preservation of social order, victims are chosen from the periphery of a community. The victim can be a domestic animal, for instance, or sometimes it can be a human, possibly a slave, a prisoner of war, a physically or mentally disabled person, an elderly person, a child, or someone deemed to be a social deviant. In some societies, human sacrifice became too disturbing so animals or effigies were substituted for the same purpose.
Girard’s hypothesis works well when he applies it to pre-modern myth and ritual but when he begins to critique modern society this book goes completely off the rails. From an intellectual point of view, modernism is defined as era of releasing humanity from its bindings. Industrial workers were to be liberated from economic slavery by communism. Psychoanalysis was meant to remove taboos and end the repression of mental energy that had built up over the centuries. Humanity would reach its full potential through technology and the free exchange of ideas. Nietzsche announced the death of God and religion was one of the casualties of modernism since it was seen as being one of the major obstacles to humanity reaching a higher stage of evolution. Girard’s take on all this is that modern society, where the judicial system has replaced religion as the primary regulatory institution, is off-balance and plagued by never-ending problems. He believes we need to return to religion to prevent the modern world from collapsing.
While his analysis of pre-modern societies is provocative and well-thought out, he leads us in the direction of a conservative agenda. He doesn’t explicitly say that we should restart using human sacrifice as a means of regulating society but he sure does hint at it loudly. His hypothesis is fundamentally conservative because the rite of sacrifice is described as a method of maintaining the status quo. It pits a conformist society, massed to participate in the ritual, against a peripheral outsider who is to be sacrificed as a scapegoat. Turned on its head and looked at from the sacrificial victim’s point of view, this is not good. Social order is more important and if you happen to be the scapegoat, that is your tough luck. The victim is someone distinct from society, possibly a non-conformist, an individualist, an artist, a member of a minority group, a person who question the established order or refuses to go along with the herd. The underlying social message is that the individual risks persecution, in the form of marginalization and possibly violence, so conforming to the community reduces the risk of being singled out for an act of persecution. This is the essence of religious communities or political parties that draw a strong line of demarcation between insiders and those outsiders. Reactionary thinking of this type can lead to fascism, genocides, holocausts, pogroms, ethnic cleansings, and other forms of crimes against humanity when taken to logical extremes. Girard does not appear to be advocating for violations of human rights when he defends a rebirth of religion in the modern world but he could easily tread that path if not cautious. In the self-critique of his own theory, he does acknowledge that rites of sacrificial violence do not always result in their intended effects and therein lies a potential for extreme danger. He would probably say that the sacrificial rite is meant to prevent those types of atrocities but still, the idea of murdering a peripheral individual to maintain the status quo of does not resonate well with moral or civilized people.
There are further problems in the examples Girard uses to support his theory. His chapter on Claude Levy-Strauss seems like a pointless sidetrack. The ceremonies and myths he dissects are taken far out of context and appear to even be incomplete. His explanation of the biblical story of Jonah is the most obvious example. The idea of the sailors throwing Jonah off their sinking ship can loosely be interpreted as a form of scapegoating and human sacrifice but it ignores the actual meaning of the story; Girard does not mention how Jonah prays to God after being swallowed by the whale and gets regurgitated as a symbolic form of redemption. The moral of the story has nothing to do with the details given by Girard. This can be said of the Dinka ritual involving the sacrifice of a cow; the full ritual is not explained and the Dinka people’s understanding of its meaning is never examined. Girard, a literary critic, appears to have no understanding of anthropological or sociological methodologies or theories but he employs cherry picked ideas from social science texts. He interprets anthropological data the same way he interprets poetry and literary fiction, without regard to the fact that literary criticism and anthropology do not overlap as disciplines in any convincing way. He also doesn’t provide enough data to support the theory that all ceremonies are variations of the one original human sacrifice. He uses less than ten examples to support a theory that would apply to a vast quantity of data, so vast that collecting all of it is an unrealistic and unrealizable goal. We can take him at his word but only up to a certain point.
He makes the same blunder in his definition of certain Greek words like “kudos”, for example. He makes assertions about the complexity of encoded information in lexical items from Ancient Greek but he is not fluent in Ancient Greek and borrows his material from other scholars who may not be entirely accurate in their explanations to begin with. Girard takes these words out of context to support ideas but he has no concept of how semantic systems operate. Words have fluid, not static, definitions and their meanings are heavily dependent on context. Think of how the word “like” can be used as a noun, a verb, an adverb, or a discourse marker depending on its lexical and syntactic environment, for example. His knowledge of linguistics is laughable. You can’t take the definition of a word in a language you don’t understand and use it to make sweeping generalizations about psychology and religion that pertain to humanity in its entirety. Girard just found some writings by other scholars who said what he wanted to hear so he lifted those ideas out of their theoretical context and used them to support his own theories. This is a matter of adjusting the evidence to fit the claim.
Finally, the idea that there was one human sacrifice that initiated all human culture, social praxis, and even language itself is an unprovable claim, at best, speculation. Girard admits himself that this can not be proven or empirically justified. Some credit can be given because he has identified and analyzed one thread of human behavior and belief that appears to run through many human societies but it doesn’t take into account all the other threads of human behavior that have, do, or will ever exist. It is one thread among many and to ascribe it the importance he does is just a little bombastic.
The idea that culture originated in this event is not convincing either. If the people who performed the first human sacrifice used any kind of tool, even something as simple as a rock or a sharpened animal bone, then culture existed before the sacrifice. Food, clothing, and shelter are the basic human elements of survival. These are biological necessities. Tools are used by humans to make the acquisition of these materials more convenient. Language is used for abstract thoughts and for the coordination of human societies to maximize the potential for survival. Since all of these innovations are rooted in biological need, it would be plausible to consider that human biology is the root of human culture. If a community leader convinced a whole society to sacrifice a human with some sort of tool, that could entail the idea that culture preceded such a happening. Girard claims that this was a religious event that caused human culture and language to develop but it is more likely that religion was a product of abstract and symbolic thought; most likely, language and culture caused religion, not the other way around.
Rene Girard has developed an interesting hypothesis about the origins of sacrificial rites and their relation to human violence. He ends the book by claiming that his theory will revolutionize the way we think about human culture, religion, art, language, and literature. That change has not yet come. It probably never will. Girard did not recognize the limitations of his own ideas or their limited applicability in the real world. He identified and described a pattern of human behavior then made grandiose claims about its importance. He was a narrow but intense thinker and the mechanics of his ideas are plausible up to a point. It’s actually surprising that he maintained his status as a scholar since his laser focus on one idea makes him more likely to have been a fanatic, a radical fundamentalist, or a cult leader. In the end though, he was a one trick pony with an ulterior motive and his overestimation of his own importance ultimately sabotaged his ideological success. People who are predisposed to religious belief will probably swallow Violence and the Sacred as a whole without asking many questions about it; those of a more secular mind probably won’t.
Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore: 1979.
