Beyond Rivalry

Deep Glamour's "What Your Jeans Say About You" (other than, "These are the only ones I could find that fit me ...") reports on a ground-breaking study in the Journal of Consumer Research that finds that our 'attachment' styles determine what jeans we wear:

 

"See, when you were but a wee babe in your mother's arms you honed one of two attachment styles, 'anxiety and avoidance,' the authors explain. Anxious people view themselves as positive or negative and avoidance people view others as positive or negative.

'Anxiously attached individuals are more influenced by "brand personalities," the idea that a brand possesses humanlike traits, such as sincerity or excitement. "Because of a low view of self, anxious individuals use brands to signal their ideal self-concept to future relationship partners and therefore focus more on the personality of the brand," the authors write.'

 

The study seems to look only at people whose styles are attachment-related anxiety and attachment-related avoidance. The study summary says nothing about the jeans preferences of people whose 'attachment style' isn't anxiety, i.e., those with a 'secure' style; how do they make these ultra-important decisions? I couldn't find a free version of the full-text article to learn more.

 

The reason I'm posting about it is that I take online surveys offered by several companies several times per week, and often these surveys ask me to describe a cereal, store, bank, insurance company, beauty product, or beverage in human terms, which stumps me every time. Can cereal be 'friendly,' 'angry,' or 'aloof'? How? I try to find the descriptors that could conceivably translate to a product, like 'reliable' or 'interesting,' and choose those just to tick one or two boxes from the 40 or so I'm presented with. (In most surveys, you have to tick at least one box per page or the survey gets stuck.) I've foten wondered what these human characteristics were doing in my survey. Now I see that the surveyors are apparently operating on the belief that people who like to take online surveys are 'anxiously attached individuals.' (Curious, I took an online attachment style quiz to see where I fall on this scale, which was squarely in the 'secure' quadrant. The other quadrants, defined by level of anxiety and avoidance, are called preoccupied, fearful-avoidant and dismissing.)

 

Paige Phelps at DG notes that the study seems seriously flawed in offering only two brands of jeans, Abercrombie & Fitch and Gap. Too true. And it's even more flawed because -- secure though I am, based on one self-administered online quiz -- I can become avoidant when anxious, and I wear only one flavour of Gap jeans, which I buy used on eBay or at Goodwill. I thought it was because they fit me best, having worn, over the years Lee, Levi, Style & Co., St. John's Bay, Covington (Sears), and lots of others whose names and humanlike qualities I can't recall. (They all seem 'blue' to me. :-)) But who knows. Maybe I think my jeans signal "secure, Christmas-loving, dog-empowered, tea-drinking, hopelessly pragmatic, mellow rationalist' to those who observe me.

 

Marginal Revolution points to two tinsel-tinted selling opps:

 

(1) Crapwrap: Have your package wrapped as badly as you would do it.  The service costs $9 and more than 500 people have signed up for it. "We're not given any instructions. I'm just asked to make a hash of it using lots of brown tape and making sure there are rips and untidy folds." (This wouldn't work for us; my spouse wraps with more care than I do.)

 

(2) Auctioning off the best seat at the family get-together.  Daughter-in-law Alexis won the eBay auction with a bid of £13.50, outbidding 17 other family rivals for the prime seat in front of the TV, with a conveniently placed side table for drinks. Otherwise, there would just have been another Boxing Day row over this 'perfect seat.'

You've probably heard about the Wal-Mart worker, Jdimytai Damour, 34, who was trampled and crushed by a stampeding crowd of early-morning shoppers at a Long Island Wal-Mart on Black Friday -- shoppers who then "went on to scour the shelves for sales, even after being told a man had died." Damour died apparently of a heart attack of asphyxiation after the sliding glass doors he was holding shut shattered under the weight of the crowd of 2,000 or so who were trying to get in as the store opened at 5 a.m. for after-Thanksgiving sales. (Ludicrous comment by a Wal-Street employee in the store's electronic department: "'It was crazy. .. The deals weren't even that good.'")

 

Here's a bit of Damour's story, and here: "He loved to chat about movies, Japanese anime and politics. ... [H]e had a great sense of humor. ... He was the guy who was always lively." He was "an easygoing literature buff -- a fan of poetry and the late novelist Donald Goines -- who would put himself out for friends."

 

 

Seems sort of fitting, after thoughts on wanting, to offer (someone else's) thoughts on having. Plus, it showed up in my RSS feeder this morning and I liked it.

 

At Get Rich Slowly, JD writes an interesting post on having. Having stuff.  A few excerpts:

 

"'You know why you can't get rid of Stuff, don't you?' Kris had asked.

"'Because I want it,' I said.

"'You think you want it,' she said. 'You like the idea of having certain things, but you don't actually use them. You've got dozens of books stacked in the guest room. They've been there since the last time you purged Stuff a year ago. Have you needed any of those books in that time?'

"'No,' I said.

 

 

"After I told my friend Amy Jo about our clutter conversation last week, she shared her own thoughts. 'We each have so many interests, and certain things — like books — keep us connected to those interests, or give us the illusion that they do,' she said.

"'But they also clog up our lives and make us less efficient at doing what we are and what we want to do right now. It's hard to let go of the things that we believe represent parts of ourselves, or we hope represent us. In many cases, these things represent who we were or wished to be at one time — not who we are right now.'"

 

 

I've become adept at preventing new Stuff from entering my life, but it's difficult for me to part with the Stuff I already own. This is a very First World problem, and in a way it makes me feel guilty. We're trained not to be wasteful. That’s not a bad thing, but I think it can prevent us from making smart decisions."

And one of the comments, from RDS, echoes this:

 

"I believe that we are the first generation in the history of the world in which just about every member of our society struggles with managing the vast amount of stuff that we own. Many of us think of all of our stuff as assets. In truth, I suspect that much of it could more accurately be classified as liabilities."

 

 

"Small children have no compunctions about saying, even shrieking, what they want. At a critical point, though -- third grade, fourth grade, fifth -- the shame of wanting sets in."

 

Ellen Tien's essay, Just Say What You Want, makes a number of interesting points, not the least of which is that we are ashamed of wanting, and particularly of being seen as 'wanty.'  We (men and women, but women more so) are afraid that if we "want too much, ... try too hard, ... commit to a desire," then people will label us "needy, bitchy, clingy, whiny. In other words, wanty." 

 

I recognise myself here, in particular:

 

"Do we even allow ourselves to know what we want?

"'Where should we go for dinner?' I ask my husband.

"'Wherever you want,' he says.

"I suggest a nice barbecue place around the corner. No, he says, he doesn't feel like barbecue. Chinese? No, he had Chinese food for lunch. Italian? No, too heavy. Thai? Too much like Chinese. Where, then, I repeat, does he want to go for dinner?

"'I dunno. Wherever you want.'

 

 

I often feel like the husband here and speak his lines. It feels in these interchanges like I don't know what I want, I only know what I don't want, and I'm not real clear on that. Sometimes it feels like nothing that's available is what I really want, so I just have to say yes to something. What I really want, or so I think, is a restaurant 1,300 miles away and I'm trying to approximate it -- or the feeling I get when I'm there -- with what's within a 10-mile radius, so it's both true that there is no one particular place where I strongly want to go and also true that there are lots of places where I don't want to go.

 

Maybe I don't really want to go out to eat at all; somehow when I crave doing something new, or when what I really want is familiarity, a feeling of comfort, or a burst of energy, a feeling of pampering, or whatever, eating out sometimes seems like the way to find it. After all, I'm not finding it at home for the moment, so I'm hoping I can find it elsewhere. But at the same time, I know that the 'elsewheres' don't really offer it, either. Reminds me of the Springsteen line, "Man, I'm just tired and bored with myself." And sometimes, even when the restlessness is within, a change of venue can help, can offer a change in perspective.

 

Not sure how shame plays into this, except that wanting, by definition, stems from a sense of lack in oneself, and to admit that we lack -- by stating a desire, by trying hard to achieve something, etc., -- is to signal to others that we are deficient in some way. It's not always seen that way, though. High-powered business people, e.g., spend a lot of time working hard to achieve and they are seen as powerful, not as clingy, needy, or wanty. ('Bitchy' and 'bastardy' at times, perhaps.) 

 

When I dither about dinner, I know it's not just about where to eat; I can feel my restlessness and the small child in me shrieking, 'Give me what I want!' even if, as is often true even for small kids, I don't know what I want.

 

I feel like blogging what I'm eating and making for dinner these days, I'd love to hear what other people are eating and making, too. I'm trying to incorporate more fish and fiber into my diet. A lot of that happens at breakfast (fiber -- 10 gms. in the oatmeal!) and lunch (fish and fiber) but I'm focusing on dinner here.

 

Last Week

 

I was on vacation in Boston, MA, and in Rehoboth Beach, DE. To the best of my memory, this is what I had for dinner (I didn't cook any of it):

 

Saturday: I attended an outdoor wedding of people I don't know with X, who does know them. Ate some appetizers like spicy cold shrimp and spanikopita (one of my favourites), along with champagne, then dinner for me was veggie kabobs and something else veggie with rice. Red wine with dinner, and lots of water. Dessert (the wedding cake) was scrumptious, moist red velvet cake. We ate outside, overlooking a meadow, and it was idyllic. I talked with my tablemates (an interesting ex-Presby pastor now working with juveniles in the prison system and his wife, an Episcopal Sunday School teacher/learning disabilities teacher) about Girard and mimetic theory! God knows what I said.

 

Sunday: My friend R. made dinner. It was broiled or baked flounder, baked macaroni with cheese (and maybe tofu in it?), and some veggies I can't recall but I'm sure they were good. We had X's delicious chocolate chip cookies for dessert, and blueberries and other fruit. Dogfish beer and brewed iced tea for drinks.

 

Monday: We (6 of us) went out to a Chinese place (Confucius) which was very good. (It was the only place we could get into at 9 p.m. without an hour's wait.) As Ch. said, it shouldn't be called Chinese; it's gourmet. I had excellent crispy fried halibut, as did Ch. I thought it was going to come with the head on and I was prepared to cut if off and ignore it, but thankfully it was headless (and more importantly, eyeless). X had sweet and sour flounder (yum), R had spicy duck that she was very pleased with, and the two vegetarians had veggie fried rice and some kind of broccoli rabe. We also shared out some appetizers, like a yummy garlic spinach. Some of us had wine, I think, and some had beer, and I had a pot of hot jasmine tea. Our only complaint with this place was that it was annoyingly loud and there weren't that many people in the room we were in. Must be the acoustics. Still, fun. I brought back half my dinner and Ch. ate it for lunch the next day.

 

Tuesday: R. made dinner again (for 8 people), with help. She marinated and grilled shark, mahi-mahi, and bluefish, and all were tender and delicious. We also had corn cakes with tofu (yum!), maybe ratatouille?, a tomato/avocado/? salad, fresh pesto pasta, and other veggies. Red wine to drink. Then various ice creams and X's chocolate chip cookies for dessert, and sliced peaches and plums. I had a blast with Ch and N especially, laughed to the point of pain.

 

Wednesday: The least best meal, at the Rusty Rudder in Dewey Beach. It was buffet for R and me, and crabcakes for Ch and X. (The kids all defected.) What was really fun was time on the deck by the canal, in the sun, beforehand, with beachy drinks (hurricanes for me), listening to Calypso music and eating a half-pound of Old Bay-spiced hot shrimp -- the kind you can't get where I live now, alas. Even the buffet was good for me, with all-I-wanted yummy crab balls (my second dose of the day), pan-battered fried shrimp, crab-stuffed flounder, lotsa veggies and green salad. We four shared a bottle of red wine with dinner.

 

Thursday: The best, 4 dozen large Maryland blue crabs. Mmmm! Plus those yummy corn cakes again, ratatouille, the tomato/avocado salad, and probably other things I ignored in my obsession with the crabs. I think I ate a dozen and there were 7 of us crab eaters at the table (plus two vegetarians). Drinks, thanks to J and Ch, were Modelo Especial, PBR, Blue Moon, and various (locally brewed) Dogfish beers. And iced tea. Ice creams (including cookie dough) and fruit for dessert. X shot some video of this dinner.

 

Friday: Before we went out to eat, we had lovely vodka cocktails at the beachhouse. Our last beach meal was at Porcini House Bistro and Treetop Lounge (they don't have a website), on 2nd St at Wilmington Ave, which I heartily recommend for nice, fairly high-end Italian dining in a casual yet elegant space. We wanted to eat in the treehouse (upstairs deck) but because it was raining buckets right up until meal time at 7, we sat in the glassed-in front porch, very comfortably. (And they contacted us in the afternoon to let us know our reservation for the treehouse would be honoured inside.) Again, it was 9 of us (including two minors, who are both vegetarians). We had two bottles of red wine with dinner, shared out some appetizers, and I had a green salad and the half portion of crab risotto for dinner. The risotto was OK (could have been more crabby -- but then, what couldn't?), but X's mushroom soup was heaven (this said by a mushroom hater), the salads (including the caprese, with ripe summer tomatoes) were fresh, the steak, flatbread and fish-eaters seemed happy with their lot, the truffled mac & cheese (using orichietti) was perfectly creamy and savory, the desserts (chocolate mousse, lemon tart, and something else) were delish, and the service was extremely attentive -- until we were charged for 3 bottles of wine (at $39 per pop) instead of 2. That put a slight damper on the evening but we got it worked out and left happy.

 

Saturday: I was in Jamaica Plain and ate at a place fast becoming a favourite, Alchemist Lounge. They have absinthe! X and I didn't order that this time but I got the lovely, wonderful St. Germain Champagne cocktail (then a glass of red wine) and she had the Leatherlips IPA from Haverhill Brewery. We started with guacamole and chips, and then for dinner, I had the broiled haddock (with rice and asparagus) and she had the fish and chips. (I've tried to find the St. Germain elderflower liqueur since but have not been able to ... )

 

This Week

 

Sunday: Home again. We ordered out for Chinese. Mine was shrimp cashew with white rice, T's was shrimp lo mein.  A bottle of Gritty's Vacationland Summer Ale with dinner.

 

Monday: More of the Chinese.

 

Tuesday: I made a hybrid meal of macaroni (whole wheat rotini) and cheeses (cheddar and Parmesan) with a roux/white sauce (butter, flour, mustard powder, milk -- should have added white wine, will do so next time), baked that with thawed frozen peas and a couple of cans of albacore tuna, with breadcrumbs and Parmesan on top. and served it with cooked spinach and a green salad (mesclun, red pepper, cucumber, black and green olives, shredded carrots, corn, Caesar dressing). Red wine with dinner.

 

Wednesday: Same as Tuesday.

 

Thursday: Same as Wednesday, with the addition of a hard-boiled egg in the salad. We finished up the bottle of wine we started on Tuesday, a Portuguese red wine I got cheap ($6?) at Whole Foods, Cerejeiras Vinho Regional Estremadura 2007. It was so-so. I don't think I'd buy it again.

 

Friday: I made the pan-fried tofu-corn cakes we had at the beach (corn, tofu, egg, milk, flour, butter, baking powder, scallions, salt, pepper), and a salad of mesclun, cucumber, red bell pepper, shredded carrots, black and green olives, garbanzo beans, whole wheat rotini, and albacore tuna, with Cardini Caesar dressing.  With the Gritty's Vacationland beer.

 

Saturday (ate dinner alone): Green salad as on Friday (with tuna and beans), plus a couple of corn cakes. Lots of decaf iced tea.

 

Dark thoughts last week as I was in the shower listening (thanks, showerbug!) to an NPR story about how China expels, arrests, and uses force to keep a lid on dissidents, in order to keep the society stable, and thinking about Girard's contention that the U.S. has managed to keep society stable without hierarchies, through social mobility, the legal and judicial systems, technology, and being part of global free market economic competition, among perhaps other ways he doesn't mention. I thought about how the U.S. maintains its fragile stability and two things come immediately to mind. We don't: the U.S. murder rate is far higher than any European country. According to 2000 data, the U.S. ranked #24 on a list of murders per capita, behind Colombia, South Africa, Venezuela, Russia, Mexico, some other bits of the USSR, and Thailand, but well ahead of India, Azerbaijan, Romania, Hungary, South Korea, the Czech Republic, Canada, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, and all of Europe, which except for Finland (#30) and Portugal (#33) ranked from #40 to #58, out of 62. The 2004 data shows an increase in the murder rate in the U.S. to 5.5 homicides per 100,000 people, compared with 2 in Canada, 1.6 in France, 1.4 in the UK, and 1 in Germany and Norway).

 

To the extent that we do maintain stability in our society, we do it at least partly by incarceration. The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other country, both in terms of numbers (gigantic China is a distance second) and percentages, so that 2.3 million, or more than 1 in 100 people, are in jail or prison (with more than 7 million on probation or parole), and 1 in 9 young black men are incarcerated. Half of those incarcerated are there for repeat non-violence offences.

 

Whether someone ends up in prison is determined by a complex matrix of factors, each of which may influence the other: race (both skin colour and psychic and historical wounds, fears, beliefs, perceptions); educational opportunity and resources; environmental factors -- everything from pollution and lead paint to family structure, community support, availability of mentors; income, income potential and family economic wealth; where one can reasonably choose to live; peers; addictions of choice; and so on. Tied in to all this are our laws, which, for instance, restrict but keep legal some addictions (cigarettes, alcohol, and prescription drugs like sleeping pills, e.g. ... and some might add non-nutritious foods, TV, technology, extreme dieting, and so on) and which outlaw others, and which enforce mandatory sentencing guidelines ("three strikes" laws).

 

Prisons keep our society stable; we can exile those who break the rules, who threaten our security, and we can effectively keep them away from the rest of us. Out of sight and out of mind.

 

Murder rates, although they have dropped from highs in the early 1990s, show we're not as stable as we think we are, at least in some areas of the country (i.e., usually in the poorest, most urbanized areas).

 

Who is being sacrificed to keep the U.S. stable? It seems clear to me that young black men are, if we can afford to lose more than 1/10 of them to prison and many more to murder -- in 2005, blacks were the victims of "nearly half the murders committed in the United States despite making up only 13 percent of the population," and slightly more than half of those were "young black men aged between 17 and 29." The children of those men are also being sacrificed. 

 

One could explore sacrifice in America in many ways -- in the economic system of haves and have-nots, in our celebrity and sports idol worship, in nursing homes and geriatric care, in women working and/or not working, our public education system, our health care system, and so on.  Another way might involve looking at deaths from motor vehicles accidents (43,300 in 2006), which occur 2.5 times more often than homicide (17,400 murders in 2006) in the U.S.  Alcohol-related motor vehicle deaths roughly equal murders, 17,941 in 2006. Obviously, motor vehicle accidents are usually far less intentional than murder, more collateral in nature even for drug-impaired drivers and reckless drivers (it's not generally their intention to kill anyone). Some motor vehicle deaths are completely accidental and perhaps unavoidable, because of poor skills, distractions, road conditions, vehicle fault, and so on; murder is never unintentional, by definition.

 

I wonder if the number of motor vehicle deaths and accidents could be said to result from our sacrifice to driving as essential to our way of life, or to our sacrifice to the cultural expectation of efficiency and getting things done as fast as possible, or to our societal tolerance for alcohol and/or to the stigma of the alcoholic in our society, or to our acceptance of social mobility as a stabilising mechanism, as Girard suggested. And so on. You get the idea. Granted, if we still rode horses or buggies, or walked long distances to get from place to place, or all took bullet trains, there would still be deaths resulting from these choices. Death happens.

 

My question is not a cloaked statement that cars and driving are bad, or that we should abolish prisons and laws; my question is, what are we sacrificing in our society, as a society, and for what purpose? And does that sacrifice bring us stability that otherwise we wouldn't have? What are the trade-offs?

 

 

 

We have long rented DVDs from a local independent source (semi-local: a 20-mile round trip) but a few weeks ago began renting through NetFlix as well, for videos the local store doesn't have and won't buy -- notably, Julia Child's "The French Chef" episodes, which our local DVD provider considers a "How-To" DVD and which I consider instructional humour. Julia Child is a trip. (How about a last-minute dinner party for 300 people?)

 

Anyway, in case you wonder whether it's more sustainable to rent locally or from a company like Netflix that mails DVDs direct, Slate's got the answers (although they compare NetFlix with Blockbuster, a chain). They look at transportation, packaging, and computer use.

 

Transportation: "Even just a two-mile drive to the video store will consume a few hundred times more energy than the Netflix delivery from a distribution center 200 miles away [ours is about 35 miles away]."

Computer Use: "30 minutes spent reordering your queue -- in a well-lit, climate-controlled room with the computer running -- will use far more energy than the actual Netflix delivery and about as much energy as it would take to drive your hybrid to a store a half-mile away." Does anyone spend 30 minutes on their queue?

 

Packaging: "It takes a significant amount of energy to make the lockable polypropylene case that you might get at a video store. ... And compared with a mail-order Tyvek sleeve, a video-store case takes up more space when it's shipped from the main distribution center."

 

(Previous posts on this topic: here, here, here, here, here and here.)

 

 

Chapter 7, Modernity, Postmodernity and Beyond

 

There's a lot of content in this chapter, and quite a lot that I couldn't assent to or felt wasn't consistent with what I know of mimetic theory (which, obviously, is a lot less than Girard knows!). It's very hard to articulate those differences -- my brain gets a little unhinged trying to follow the logic that some other part of me intuits, accurately or not -- and I may not be able to go into much detail there.

 

Finishing the book, I felt as I always do when reading Girard or listening to him in a video or audiotape: I have so many different questions from the ones he's addressing or is asked to respond to!

 

For instance, in chapter 6 he says that in myths there"always seems to be a good cause for hating the victim, but in reality it is a spurious, illusory cause." He never says in this book or anywhere else I've read/heard whether it's possible to be a victim and be guilty. Are no victims guilty or hate-able? Are we all innocent? To clear this up seems fundamental to me. I'm thinking in part of the mob violence incidents that go on all the time -- granted, the charges often seem trumped up and rationalised (or not even) by the perpetrators, but sometimes the victim actually has killed another person or done the crime of which they are accused -- It seems different to me to say that that person doesn't deserve to be attacked by a mob or killed for their crime than to say that they are innocent. Is there a way to be guilty of what one is accused and still innocent (in the eyes of God, perhaps)? Even the idea of accusation (at least the mimetic accusatory gesture) in mimetic theory is seen as Satanic. So this is very unclear to me. I easily understand that we are all perpetrators; what I don't understand is how we are all innocent victims. Or is Girard saying that innocence or guilt simply doesn't matter for the mechanism -- perhaps some are guilty of what they're accused of, but others are not (for one, Jesus) and they will be seen as guilty anyway, because they have to be seen as guilty for the mechanism to work?

 

That's just one clarification I'd like made. There are dozens more, several about issues he addresses in chapter 7. And then there are real-life scenarios I'd like him to explore, to help me see where the mimesis is, how the doubles are similar, whether the seeming self-sacrifice is Christlike or simply mimetic, i.e., done in a spirit of competition to seem better (more sacrificial) than the other. I have a lot of questions about the "good" uses of the mimetic mechanism to hold violence at bay. And so on. And on.

 

Anyway, here are my notes on chapter 7, the final chapter.

 

 

** Apocalypse (more about how we're to fare now that the mimetic mechanism has been revealed)

 

"For me, any understanding of the contemporary world is mediated by the reading of Matthew 24. The most important part is the sentence 'where the corpse lies, the vultures shall gather' ... because it seems to be a decomposition of the mimetic mechanism. The mechanism is visible, but it doesn't work.  ... Any great Christian experience is apocalyptic because what one realizes is that after the decomposition of the sacrificial order there is nothing standing between ourselves and our possible destruction. How this will materialize, I don't really know."

 

The Anti-Christ is nothing but "the ideology that attempts to outchristianize Christianity, that imitates Christianity in a spirit of rivalry. ... You can foresee the shape of what the Anti-Christ is going to be in the future: a super-victimary machine that will keep on sacrificing in the name of the victim."

 

Wow.

 

One (or at least, I) can immediately envision the scenario of people who feel they are well-meaning who will do anything to ensure that the human race is not destroyed and who will see to it that victims are saved -- even if they have to yell and scream at the perpetrators and their allies, even if they have to use propaganda against the perpetrators, even if they have to expel, dehumanise, or destroy the perpetrators. The only thing they (we) won't do is recognise that they/we are the perpetrators, that they/we can't save humanity by destroying those who don't agree with us, those who are so clearly wrong and who are so clearly destroying everything we love. I can imagine that, and, it's been tried.

 

"Ideologies are not violent per se, rather it is man who is violent. Ideologies provide the grand narrative which covers up our victimary tendency. They are mythical happy endings to our histories of persecution. ... The Cross has destroyed one and for all the cathartic power of the scapegoat mechanism. Consequently, the Gospel does not provide a happy ending to our history. It simply shows us two options ... : either we imitate Christ, giving up all our mimetic violence, or we run the risk of self-destruction. The apocalyptic feeling is based on that risk."

 

Later, he speaks about this again:

 

"[T]he more there is an opening in the world where ritual is dead, the more dangerous this world becomes. It has both positive aspects, in the sense that there is less sacrifice, and negative aspects, in that there is an unleashing of mimetic rivalry. As I said, we live in a world where we take care of victims in a way no other society or historical time ever did, but we are also in a world that kills more people than ever, so we have the feeling that both the 'good' and the 'bad' are increasing all the time. If we have a theory of culture, it has to account for this extraordinary ambivalence of our society." 

 

He suggests that the world is, paradoxically (as secularism increases, as the Bible has been abandoned by most) becoming ever more Christian, in a way: "Because the victimary principle of the defence of the victims has become holy*: it is the absolute. One will never see anyone attacking it. They do not even have to mention it. So we can say we are all believers in the innocence of the victims, which is at the core of Christianity. ... Of course, very often Christian principles are prevailing in a caricaturist form, whereby the defence of the victims entails new persecutions! One can persecute today only in the name of being against persecution. One can only persecute persecutors. You just have to prove that your opponent is a persecutor in order to justify your own desire to persecute." (Earlier, in chapter 6, Girard has briefly made a distinction between sacred (God of violence) and holy (God of non-violence), which I'm not sure obtains here. I don't read it to obtain.)

 

Our acceptance of the persecution of those who are seen to persecute 'victims' is what has become largely invisible to us; this is what has become so fundamental that we don't even notice it anymore ("they do not even have to mention it") -- it's assumed that victims are sacred and that to defend them is sacred; this is what is behind mob violence (or mob justice, as some have it) and its justification. 

 

As Girard says a bit later, in talking about why we are still so violent in these many days since the Christian revelation: "Man has a tendency to relapse into the sacred, prompting violence to defend any idea of principle seen simply as sacred." 

 

And, finally, "The compassion for the victim is the deeper meaning of Christianity. We will always be mimetic; but we do not have to engage automatically in mimetic rivalries."

 

 

** Individualism in the Modern (post-1500) World

 

"Regarding the emergence of the modern individual, I would say that it is important not to completely dismiss this as being exclusively an illusion of mimetic desire. This is a very important point. Undoubtedly, ... there is a real individual. This is the one who goes against the crowd for reasons that aren't rooted in the negative aspects of mimetic desire. ... The Christian individual contradicts the crowd; he or she doesn't join the multitude in the scapegoat  resolution of the mimetic crisis, and moreover denounces the very scapegoat mechanism as a murder through the declaration of the innocence of the victim."

 

But there are also individuals who are not autonomous, whose judgments are not their own. "In other words, it is to do with fashion: no one is conventional today, everybody wants to be more original than the next person. The only way modernity can be defined is the universalization of internal mediation [i.e. desire that is influenced or created by peers], for one doesn't have areas of life that would keep people apart from each other, and that would mean that the construction of our beliefs and identity cannot but have strong mimetic components." 

 

** Kathecon: Holding Back Violence with Violence

 

Girard suggests that at least in the U.S., social mobility helps to reduce violent mimesis. He also seems to feel that the U.S. and other western countries have found other means to reduce violence mimesis and maintain stability without resorting to hierarchies (which offer fewer opportunities for internal mediation and more for external mediation, which is not so conflictual because comparisons are made with people who we know will never be our equals).

 

Some of these other means are the legal system, judicial institutions, technology, and free market economic competition. Girard seems to see the 'free market' as a 'good' while he also admits that "this mimetic competition produces high doses of resentment, that might be socially 'stored' and could become harmful at some point." (Later, he notes that "if it is true that inequality is growing between the First and Third World countries, [violence] is bound to become explosive.") About technology, Girard again finds it to be useful to "diminish the impact of mimetic impulses" though "it also increases the power and possible harmful actions of aggression and violence." (Yeah.)

 

Antonello and Castro Rocha push Girard quite a bit about the sacrificial nature of the free market economic system: "Econometrics is the calculation of the tolerable number of sacrifices in a given market. Could we say that economy and market are founded on the principles of exclusion?"  Girard says that's excessive; he believes (as does Eric Gans, he says) that globalization "produces wealth and helps in stabilizing society" and that it has no "central agency." He takes it even farther:

 

"For me, globalization is mainly the abolition not only of sacrifice, properly speaking, but also of the entire sacrificial order. It is the encompassing spread of Christian ethics and epistemology in relation to every sphere of human activity." 

 

He would have to elaborate much more thoroughly here for me to see how this is true, either that globalization abolishes the sacrificial order, or that it's a system run by a Christian ethic. All he does say, after more pushing, is "I am not claiming that our world is not unstable, and above all, I am not saying at all that ours is an ideal world! I think it is a very fragile one, and still very unjust, but it has elements of stability that replace the external mediation once provided by the sacred order."

 

When the questioners insist that "the market appears as a system which produces a 'tolerable' amount of victims," Girard responds that "it also saves more victims than any previous historical movement ever did! One cannot balance these accounts, and balance them against what? We do not have a clear model to compare with. It is the first time in world history that a society cannot be compared with any other since ours is the first to encompass the whole planet."

 

He goes on to say that "I don't think we can fully equate the victims of a system as complex as the global market with the deliberate slaughtering of a human being by other human beings involved in sacrificial rituals. The market is not a technical apparatus devised to kill people" like the Nazi gas chambers were.

 

Maybe they're not equivalent, but if the economic system isn't set up intentionally to sacrifice -- or if through meconnaissance, the mechanism is covered in a cloud of unknowing -- are we saying that it can't possibly be involved in sacrificial ritual?  I feel Girard is being thick here, very narrowly defining the idea of a sacrificial system (technical apparatus? devised?) and unwilling to consider how an economic system can be sacrificial.

 

Particularly as he then goes on to speak of economics as completely religious (i.e., sacrificial) in origin! (More on that in a moment)

 

Still speaking of economics, he says that "the kathecon [containing nature] of these systems still relies on false transcendence, and they are inevitably bound to produce injustice and violence, but we live in a world where the Satanic power of the mimetic mechanism is unleashed, so we have to take into account that this system is also protecting us, albeit temporarily, from the explosion of even greater violence. ... I am not an advocate of globalization or the so-called new international order. I am just trying to see the complexity of the contemporary situation without reducing it either to an irresponsible celebration or to a complete condemnation." 

 

Then he talks about Roberto Calasso's idea that "economics was born within a sacred space." Girard says that

 

"In our society religion has been completely subsumed by economics, but precisely because economics springs from a religious matrix. It is nothing but the secularized form of religious ritual." 

 

I ask again, then how can economics be devoid of sacrifice?

 

Originally, "trade was really an offering to the foreigner, in order to placate the foriegn god, who was seen as a possible threat. ... Even etymologically the word money is related to the goddess Juno Moneta and her temple, in whose proximity coins were minted." 

 

In a paragraph about mass media, Girard has a bit to say about the TV show "Seinfeld," "which uses mimetic mechanisms constantly and depicts its characters as puppets of mimetic desire." It gets away with it for the same reason Shakespeare did: it gets close enough to painful social truths that people identify with the characters, without fully understanding the mechanism; "they recognize something that is very common and very true, but they cannot define it."

 

 

** Democracy -- Apathy instead of Conflict?

Elena Pulcini and Jean-Michel Oughourlian both think that "contemporary democray is dominated by conformism, which is produced by 'the passion for equality,' and which engenders apathy and indifference instead of conflict." Oughourlian feels that "contemporary individuals aren't strong enough to have mimetic desire. They aren't passionate about anything." Girard used to believe this could never be but now is more open to the idea:

 

"Consumption society, which was 'invented' partially to cope with mimetic aggressive behaviour, has eventually created these socially indifferent human beings unable to communicate with each other and mainly concerned with what is strictly accountable in their life, in the sense of self-interest.  This is a radical form of nihilism ...."

 

 

** Gifts and Generosity

 

Pulcini speaks of the emergence of a homo reciprocus, where gift-giving will be the center of social activity. Girard is wary of this, both because the act of generosity she's talking about (dépense) has its origins in an orgiastic victimary mechanism and because "the notion of gift, as everybody knows, is extremely ambiguous, because of the reciprocity it implies; any form of mimetic reciprocity may trigger negative effects. The paroxysm of gift-giving is clear in the phenomenon of the potlatch as described by Marcel Mauss, which is nothing but a ritualized form of mimetic rivalry on a social scale: what is important is not the object that you offer, but the humiliation that you want to inflict on the rival tribe. ... I think we should move towards an ethics of generosity, but going beyond the notion of gift. ... A good relationship cannot be anything but reciprocal. This reciprocity should be spontaneous. If there is an obligation, it means that we are approaching bad reciprocity."

 

Interestingly, it is right here that Girard brings up Matthew 5:39. where Jesus instructs us that if someone strikes us on one cheek, we should turn the other cheek to him also. He says that Jesus isn't advocating masochism but is warning of the danger of bad reciprocity, of the escalation of violent mimesis. I've heard this instruction and the others with it explicated differently, as advocating shaming the other by offering even more than is demanded (the other cheek, the inner cloak, to walk more miles) in order by our sacrifice to somehow 'show' the other the error of his ways. That rendering seems to me to be similar to the 'gift' one gives the rival in order to humiliate him or her.

 

 

 

 

 

Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the eleventh post on this topic; the first is here.

 

PART II: Solutions

CHAPTER 5 - BOHEMIA

 

Bohemians came to prominence in France after Napoleon, 1815. Bohemians are found in all social classes, age groups, professions, and in both genders. They include Romantics, surrealists, Beatniks, punks, situationalists, Kibbutzbiks, et. al.

 

Bohemians lived simply, read a lot, didn't care much for money, were melancholic, had an allegiance to art and emotion, led unconventional sex lives, and ... some of the women wore their hair short! Most importantly, they did not fit into the bourgeois conception of respectability.

 

Bohemians don't like the bourgeoisie, private schools, debutantes and 'eligible bachelors,' blood sports, missionaries, bores, and people who worry about their reputations.

Bohemians like men and women, Nietzsche, Picasso, Kokoschka, jazz, acrobats, Havelock Ellis, the Mediterranean, DH Lawrence, those who don't anticipate life after death.

 

Flaubert: "Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom."

 

The bourgeoisie are seen as prudes, materialistic, both cynical and sentimental, immersed in trivia and trivial pursuits. 

 

'Real' bohemians were those who "set themselves up as sabatoeurs of the economic meritocracy." They valued 'sensitivity' over worldly ambition. Work and money, they felt, destroyed one's capacity for sensitivity. They thought themselves "deserving of the highest honour for their ethical good sense and their powers of receptivity and expression." [Isn't this just another form of meritocracy, status based on talent, skill, intelligence?]

 

Thoreau - lack of wealth didn't necessarily mean, as the bourgeois said, that one was a loser at the game of life; one might be impoverished financially because one focused energies on things other than making money, equally enriching in their own right.

 

Bohemians (and others) realised that maintaining confidence in their values, so at odds with the mainstream, required mixing socially mainly with others who shared the same values, and reading and listening to materials that supported their values. Hence, enclaves of Bohemians in Montparnasse, Bloomsbury, Chelsea, Greenwich Village, Venice Beach, etc.

 

Bohemians redefined failure. For the bourgeoisie, failure in business or the arts was an indictment of character because it's assumed that society is fair in distributing its rewards. For bohemians, there's nothing punitive about failure. In fact, because those who succeed in society are those who can best "pander to the flawed values of their audiences," commercial success was viewed with some suspicion. (Myth of the misunderstood artist)

 

Bohemians emphasise the "dignity and superiority of the rejected ones," which is a secular counterpart to the Christian message and story of Jesus's marginalisation and crucifixion: "Torture at the hands of the uncomprehending masses" is "evidence of the righteousness of the neglected party."

 

Sometimes bohemians were "radicals devoted to anything so long as it was taboo in the Mid-West," shocked the middle class, outraged public opinion. 

 

It's "only a short step from valuing originality and emphasising the non-material aspects of life to feeling that almost anything that could surprise a judge or pharmacist -- from crustacean-walking [Gérard de Nerval] to strawberry-breast-cooking [Filippo Marinetti] -- must be important."

 

Most generally, bohemia has legitimised the pursuit of an alternative way of life." They "articulated a case for a spiritual as opposed to a material method of evaluating both oneself and others."