Who Is René Girard?
And Why Does Silicon Valley Care? Justin E. H. Smith
1. Although the literary theorist and anthropologist René Girard has many Silicon Valley disciples, surely the most notable of them is the German-born venture capitalist and founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel. A student of Girard’s while at Stanford in the late 1980s, Thiel would go on to report, in several interviews, and somewhat more sub-rosa in his 2014 book, From Zero to One, that Girard is his greatest intellectual inspiration. He is in the habit of recommending Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978) to others in the tech industry. Girard has two big ideas, each intertwined with the other: the theory of mimesis, and the theory of the scapegoat. Michel Serres, another French theorist long resident at Stanford, and a strong advocate for Girard’s ideas, has described Girard as the “Darwin of the human sciences”, and has identified the mimetic theory as the relevant analog in the humanities of the Darwinian theory of natural selection. For Girard, everything is imitation. Or rather, every human action that rises above “merely” biological appetite and that is experienced as desire for a given object, in fact is not a desire for that object itself, but a desire to have the object that somebody else already has. This makes obvious sense, in a Veblenian key — plainly, indisputably, nobody wants a Rolex simply in order to be able to keep track of the passage of time with greater precision. Girard notes that the Old Testament authors were lucid enough about human motivation to tackle mimetic desire explicitly in at least four of the Ten Commandments, most notably in the prohibition on coveting, specifically, your neighbor’s goods. The great problem of our shared social existence is not wanting things, it’s wanting things because they are someone else’s.
Of course, the problem did not go away with the prohibition, and for Girard this can only be because it is the universal basis of all human culture. Desire for what the other person has brings about a situation in which individuals in a community grow more similar to one another over time in a process of competition-cum-emulation. Such dual-natured social encounters, more precisely, are typical of people who are socially more or less equal. In relation to a movie star who does not even know some average schlub exists, that schlub can experience only emulation (this is what Girard calls “external mediation”), but in relation to a fellow schlub down the street (a “neighbor” in the Girardian-Biblical sense), emulation is a much more intimate affair (“internal mediation”, Girard calls it), which necessarily carries with it a simultaneous negative charge of desire to annihilate the person we seek to resemble. Among neighbors, the object of desire itself is eventually forgotten in the course of this process, and at the end the competitors stand in relation to one another as “doubles”: neither recalls what that thing is that the other had and that he or she wanted, and each has become undifferentiable from the other. This is the moment of what Girard calls “mimetic crisis”, which is resolved by the selection of a scapegoat, whose casting-out from the community has the salvific effect of unifying the opposed but undifferentiated doubles. The scapegoat occupies a liminal status between the sacred and the despised (compare Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the dual meaning of the sacred as exemplified by the figure of the Homo sacer), and is in many cultures someone with a notable physical and mental disability — people with albinism, for example, are a common target in much of sub-Saharan Africa. In a community in which the mimetic mechanism has led to widespread non-differentiation, or in other words to a high degree of conformity, it can however happen that scapegoating approaches something like the horror scenario in Shirley Jackson’s 1948 tale, “The Lottery”. As Girard explains in an interview, published in 2004 under the title Les origines de la culture, “The more undifferentiated people become, the easier it is to decide that any one of them whatsoever is guilty” [plus les gens deviennent indifférenciés, plus il est facile de décider que n’importe lequel d’entre eux est coupable] (82).