The One by Whom Scandal Comes

Chapter 8. Hominization and Natural Selection

85 CHAPTER 8 Hominization and Natural Selection MARIA STELLA BARBERI: Some readers of your last book understood you to have given up on modern hopes and expectations of scientific progress. They feel that promoting research in the name of the future, rather than of the past, holds greater promise because it would open up new perspectives in mimetic theory. How do you respond to this suggestion? RENÉ GIRARD: I think it is misguided. At bottom, what is at issue—and what has never really been discussed—is the capacity of mimetic theory to account for the process of hominization in terms of natural selection. I have given the matter some thought, but my ideas are not yet fully worked out. Darwin’s theory remains a very fruitful hypothesis, it seems to me; certainly a great deal of work continues to be published. With regard to the emergence of those traits that set genus Homo apart from its primate ancestors, it turns out that later stages of biological evolution favored certain kinds of culture rather than others. Mimetic theory offers an elegant explanation for this, thereby filling a number of gaps in the standard account of hominization. The point of view adopted by mimetic theory is totally different than that of nineteenth-century anthropology, which couldn’t imagine that the study of animal behavior might be a means of understanding the mimetic 86 Chapter Eight reality that preceded mankind. People who criticize me for being stuck in the nineteenth century fail to see that mimetic theory is rooted in ethology. And it is exactly this incomprehension that makes the idea of a collective founding murder seem improbable to some. Obviously my thinking breaks with both German idealism and the post-idealism of deconstruction. It signals a return to reality itself, to the “referent” (a wonderful word, it seems to me). The linguistic nihilism of my critics conjures an image of tweezers, which they use to avoid having any direct contact with reality—even when reality is what one has to deal with. Cover that bosom, which I cannot bear to see.1 MSB: Two objections in particular have been brought against your theory in recent years. The first is social and psychological in nature. It criticizes you for having too negative and pessimistic a view of mankind, for claiming, in effect, that we can get along with our neighbors only by oppressing others. The second is theological, and reproaches you for seeing in Christ’s sacrifice only the anthropological fact of communal reconciliation. From different points of view, these objections call into question the relationship between mimetic desire and the function of scapegoats. What do you say in response? RG: They are not really objections. There are many people who don’t like what I do. That’s their right—no one, least of all me, forces them to read my work. But they completely fail to understand my purpose. I am first and foremost a researcher. I am not a French intellectual who proposes a certain way of looking at the new decade or the new millennium. I am a researcher, and what I have found seems to me to be true. I therefore don’t feel obliged to modify my findings because more or less optimism is needed to satisfy some group of clients. MSB: You are fond of saying that you are a Christian and a Darwinian thinker. RG: It’s absurd to think of the mechanism of collective violence as operating on the compressed time scale of human history. Once dominance hierarchies disappear, societies founded on them either disappear or embrace the sacred. Only the sacred can save them, because it alone can create prohibitions and rituals that eliminate violence. One mustn’t think of archaic religion in terms of freedom and morality, but in terms of a mechanism of natural selection. Hominization and Natural Selection 87 Richard Dawkins understands perfectly what the anti-evolutionists do not, namely, that geological time has nothing whatever to do with historical time.2 In its initial phase, the invention of religion was intermediate between animal and man. My book Violence and the Sacred didn’t pay as much attention as it should have to the fact that evolution operated over hundreds of thousands of years, which is to say a span of time that is absolutely inconceivable for human beings. If I could rewrite it today, I would try to show that, on an evolutionary scale, chance operates...