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155 C H A P T E R 8 Sacred Violence, Mimetic Rivalry, and War Melvin Konner To make these processes effective once again, people are tempted to multiply the innocent victims, to kill all the enemies of the nation or the class . . . and to sing the praises of murder and madness. —René Girard In brilliantly original works such as Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (the source of the epigraph) and Violence and the Sacred, René Girard confronts fully a possibility that most modern social scientists have shied away from: that bloodshed may be at or close to the heart of all human social life.1 The above quote occurs in the context of a conversation about the theories and movements spawned by Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and even Foucault, all of which might be characterized as enthusiasms for which Girard has limited sympathy. Although they all share his willingness to acknowledge the role of violence, they also share the conviction that with the right approach (communist revolution, the triumph of the übermensch, universal psychoanalysis , or the overthrow of illegitimate power), the centrality of violence can be overcome. I call this the Tinker Theory: Human life is terribly flawed, but if we tinker with the class structure, or the unconscious, or the reins of power, all 156 Melvin Konner will be well. Girard considers this naive and potentially dangerous. In reality, none of these approaches has succeeded in its goals, and in some cases the consequences have been unspeakably dreadful. Girard (rightly in my view) takes these failures as evidence that violence is and will likely remain central to human experience. In fairness to Freud, some of his later writings—Civilization and Its Discontents, for example—seem almost Girardian in their acceptance of the ultimate tension between aggressive or “death” instincts and the cooperation needed for civilized life. But in his famous exchange of letters with Albert Einstein in 1932, it was Freud who played the optimist. The physicist began by bemoaning human susceptibility to propaganda leading to war: “How is it that these devices succeed so well in rousing men to such wild enthusiasm, even to sacrifice their lives? Only one answer is possible. Because man has within him a lust for hatred and destruction. In normal times this passion exists in a latent state, it emerges only in unusual circumstances, but it is a comparatively easy task to call it into play and raise it to the power of a collective psychosis.”2 This is a great oversimplification, since the posited “lust for hatred and destruction” exists only under certain circumstances. A more general and easily evoked human emotional state is the anger that arises in response to frustration, fear, and grief. As we will see, combined with an easy slide into dichotomous thought that may lead to pseudo-speciation, the outcome can be ethnic violence, including war or genocide. Freud wrote of his “entire agreement ” regarding the lust for destruction, but they differed on a crucial point: For Freud, “whatever fosters the growth of culture works at the same time against war.”3 Einstein doubted the civilizing power of culture, and to the world’s great sorrow, he proved the more prescient thinker. Girard appears to be closer to Einstein, but for subtler reasons. As I read him, he has made at least two major contributions to our discourse about violence. One is the concept of mimetic rivalry, according to which angry and competing individuals or groups in confrontation inevitably imitate one another, and in so doing escalate their rivalry into ever-greater risk of ever-greater violence. The other is the thesis of sacrificial violence, which holds that ritual sacrifice is a way of deflecting mimetic rivalry and exporting it from the community, defusing the process that otherwise results in what Hobbes called “the war of all against all.” Whether impassioned and Dionysian, as in the ad hoc human sacrifice in Euripides’ The Bacchae, or controlled by the strictest ritual, as in the priestly animal sacrifices in the Israelite Temple, the result is similar: the bloodshed is that Violence, Rivalry, and War 157 of a designated victim, and it is sacred because it prevents us from shedding one another’s. And woe to the social world if it does not. Then, to paraphrase Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, you “let slip the dogs of war,” and the foul deed of a sacrifice not agreed upon “cries...

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