The One by Whom Scandal Comes

Chapter 11. Positivists and Deconstructionists

113 CHAPTER 11 Positivists and Deconstructionists MARIA STELLA BARBERI: From the anthropological point of view, there is a limit to our knowledge of ultimate things, a limit beyond which it is not given to human beings to glimpse the hidden foundations of the world. Hypotheses may be advanced concerning these foundations, but they cannot be known empirically. Nevertheless you insist, rightly it seems to me, that your work has the character of a scientific hypothesis. RENÉ GIRARD: Mimetic theory does not pretend to be exhaustive from the anthropological point of view. It seeks to describe the transition from one typeofreligiontoanother.Beyondthat,itdoesnotclaimtoexhausttheinnumerable forms this transition has assumed in human history. Whether or not it is right to resist the temptation to give a complete account of variants that hold no theoretical, no explanatory interest hardly matters, since a victim is always found at the center. Mimetic theory is explicitly anti-relativist, for it tries to give a unique and comprehensive explanation of archaic religion, just as positivist anthropology did. It doesn’t try to do this in a positivist manner —though in some respects it doesn’t disturb me to be called a positivist. Without entering into a technical discussion of what positivism involves, let me simply say that mimetic theory, the light that it shines on myths, explains 114 Chapter Eleven too many things for it not to be true. As in a detective novel, when the clues become too numerous, they can’t be regarded as the result of mere coincidence . Mimetic theory explains the presence of disabilities and infirmities in a great many mythical stories. When there is no ground for making a victim of someone—because he isn’t guilty of anything—people act as children do and make a scapegoat of someone who is physically unattractive, or who is an outsider. The number of outsiders in myths is quite extraordinary. And why are so many victims lame? My work is scientific because it tries to solve the puzzle constituted by these clues, to explain why outsiders, many of them handicapped, are made into victims and forcibly expelled from a community. The burden falls on anyone who doubts my theory to supply a better explanation, or else to adopt mine for want of a more satisfactory one. Contemporary thought tries to avoid this choice by taking refuge in various forms of idealism. The fact that I situate myself in a scientific perspective is important for understanding my theory. MSB: From a scientific point of view, the most probable hypothesis is the one that does the best job of explaining a given set of the phenomena. RG: One may always suppose that there is another hypothesis that explains still more than the one that is presently accepted—but that, finally, remains a supposition. Karl Popper’s claim that every scientific theory is falsifiable misses just this point. The fact that the Earth turns around the sun, and not vice versa, will never again be challenged. The same goes for the circulation of the blood. Here we have, rather than scientific hypotheses, something more like experimental results. When we see the sun rise, we don’t imagine that it comes out of the Earth. We know very well that the Earth turns. In a certain sense it might be said that we see it turn. It is the same thing with witch hunts in the Middle Ages. What would you do if someone were to say that witch hunts were due to divine intervention? You would laugh at him, because you know perfectly well it’s not true. You don’t need a scientific hypothesis, because the evidence is incontrovertible. The fact that Jews were sometimes killed in the Middle Ages “without cause” is just that, a fact and not a debatable proposition. You’re not going to wonder all of a sudden whether perhaps the Jews did in fact spread plague. The reason you’re not going to has nothing to do with peer pressure; you know that you’re dealing with a Positivists and Deconstructionists 115 mimetic scapegoat phenomenon. Because witch-hunting is known to have been practiced in the fifteenth century, people instinctively leap to the same explanation that mimetic theory advances. But they run through the steps of the argument so quickly that they don’t see the theory. They believe that they need only concern themselves with the “raw data” of conscious experience, and...