The One by Whom Scandal Comes

Chapter 1. Violence and Reciprocity

3 CHAPTER 1 Violence and Reciprocity How shall we find the concord of this discord? —Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act V, scene i) W hy is there so much violence in our midst? No question is more debated today. And none produces more disappointing answers. In the past, when people talked about the threats facing humanity, they always mentioned human violence, but it came after other perils that seemed to them still more formidable: destiny, the gods, nature, perhaps also the ferocious beasts that painters and illustrators until not so very long ago imagined to be even more enormous and more frightening than they really were. We may smile on being reminded of this, but in a way that suggests nostalgia more than amusement. Of all the threats presently looming over us, the most dreadful one, as we well realize, the only real threat, is ourselves. This truth becomes more striking every day, for every day our violence grows greater. With the end of the Cold War, the risks of cataclysmic war receded and pacifists rejoiced. Nevertheless there was a sense of foreboding, that another titanic contest had merely been postponed. It had long been said, though no 4 Chapter One one really believed it, that terrorism would take the place of traditional warfare . It was hard to see how terrorism could be as terrifying as the prospect of a nuclear exchange between superpowers. Today we see. Violence seems be to be escalating in a way that may be likened to the spread of a fire or an epidemic. The great mythic images rise up again before our eyes, as if violence had rediscovered a very ancient and rather mysterious form, a swirling vortex in which the most acute kinds of violence merge into one. There is one kind of violence, the kind found in families and in schools, especially in America, where teenagers slaughter their classmates. And then there is the kind of violence that is now seen throughout the world, a terrorism without limits or boundaries that heralds an age of wars of extermination against civil populations. We seem to be hurtling toward a moment when all mankind will be confronted with the reality of its own violence. So long as globalization was slow in coming, everyone hoped and prayed that it would come soon. The unity of the world’s nations was one of the great triumphalist themes of modernism. World’s fairs were staged in its honor, one after another. Now that globalization is here, however, it arouses more anxiety than pride. The erasing of differences may not portend the era of universal reconciliation that everyone confidently expected. There are two main modern approaches to violence. The first is political and philosophical. It holds that human beings are naturally good and ascribes anything that contradicts this assumption to the imperfections of society, to the oppression of the people by the ruling classes. The second is biological. Within the animal kingdom, which is naturally peaceable, only the human race is truly capable of violence. Freud spoke of a death instinct. Today we seek to identify the genes responsible for aggression. These two approaches have proved to be sterile. For years now I have argued for a third approach, one that is both very new and very old. When I speak of it a certain interest is awakened, only to be immediately replaced by skepticism once I pronounce the key word of my hypothesis: imitation. Biologically determined appetites and needs, which are common to both men and animals, and unchanging since they bear upon fixed objects, stand in contrast to desire and passion, which are exclusively human. Passion, intense desire, is born the moment our vague longings are trained on a model Violence and Reciprocity 5 thatsuggeststouswhatweshoulddesire,typicallyindesiringthemodelitself. This model may be society as a whole, but often it is an individual whom we admire. Everything that humanity endows with prestige it transforms into a model. This is true not only of children and adolescents, but also of adults. In observing people around us we quickly perceive that mimetic desire, or desirous imitation, dominates not only the smallest details of our everyday behavior, but also the most important choices of our lives, the choice of a spouse, of a career, even the meaning that we give to our existence. What we call desire or passion is not mimetic accidentally, or from time to time, but is mimetic unavoidably, all the time. Far from being the most...