Tag: philosophy

HANNAH ARENDT AND THE ‘CRISIS OF OUR TIME’

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

Undoubtedly, one of the most important books written in, and left to us from the 20th century was and is Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Why? It is a thorough and spellbinding work on the history of the two-century unfolding of that nightmare of butchery and twisted deceit. It is also a deep and penetrating work of political philosophy which serves as a frightening and lasting reminder that humanity is permanently threatened by the destructive seeds from which that cancer grew. She reminds us that it could happen again.

Predictions are of little avail and less consolation, she writes, but goes on to say that there remains the fact that the crisis of our time and its central experience have brought forth an entirely new form of government -Totalitarianism.  In 1966 she held that this, as a potentiality and an ever-present danger, is only too likely to stay with us from now on,. Just as other forms of government which came about at different historical moments and rested on different fundamental experiences, have stayed with mankind regardless of temporary defeats – monarchies, and republics, tyrannies, dictatorships and despotism. 

Nearly sixty years later, with the evidence we have of totalitarian tendencies in our public life we are hardly in a position to dispute her assertion. 

Arendt began writing her study of the origins of totalitarianism as early as 1945. One incarnation of that catastrophic horror had just been eliminated at the cost of a terrible war. Another was still exercising the full force of its tyranny, while the third was about to begin its reign of terror in the Far East. The first to be vanquished was that which had spread across Europe from Nazi Germany; the second was Stalin’s Soviet Empire with its multiple puppet satellites in eastern Europe; the third was the People’s Republic of China with its overcooked clones, North Korea and Vietnam. That one is still with us, carefully camouflaging itself in an attempt to make us think that it is not what it really is.

We think of all these aberrations as 20th century phenomena. Arendt’s great and prophetic work shows us, however, that their origins go back through a century and a half of mankind’s confused reading of our world, human society and the many deadly turnings which political thought took over that period. 

Yuval Levin’s  book, The Great Debate, is a  study of the arguments between Edmund Burke and Tom Paine in the 1790s. In it he showed how the critical divergence in western political thought in our own time dates from then. That debate was essentially over the foundations on which the rights of man are based. In many ways it matches Arendt’s own vision of where our 20th century nightmare started. If we want a dramatic symbol for the turning point which led us to the disasters of our time we might take the enthronement of the goddess of reason on the high altar of Notre Dame de Paris. This was the symbolic and fatal moment when Man was declared to be the centre of all things.

I could not hope and would not dare to try to offer a succinct summary of Arendt’s masterpiece, all 600-plus pages of it. The best I can do is explain that In the three parts of her study – the first edition was published in 1950, later revisions in 1966 – the phenomena she holds to account for the world’s greatest catastrophes and the political impasse she saw in the Cold War in the1960s, are antisemitism, imperialism and totalitarianism which they spawned.

Arendt died 50 years ago (1975). The chilling thing about everything in her work is that she speaks to our world today in so many ways. One of the great evils which she saw in her time and which, in her view, contributed to the despair on which totalitarianism nurtured itself, was loneliness.  She noted that totalitarian regimes fostered the atomisation of individuals in society. Loneliness accompanied this, which along with distrust of others fostered the semi-worship of the all-powerful deadly state systems which the 20th century had to suffer. 

What is one of the tragic human maladies of which 21st century men and women have again become painfully conscious? Loneliness.

She wrote in 1966, reflecting on the deadly attraction of the so-called intelligentsia to this new state system, What’s more disturbing to our peace of mind than the unconditional loyalty of members of totalitarian movements, and the popular support of totalitarian regimes, is the unquestionable attraction these movements exert on the elite, and not only on the mob elements in society. It would be rash indeed to discount, because of artistic vagaries or scholarly naïveté, the terrifying roster of distinguished men whom totalitarianism can count among its sympathizers, fellow-travelers, and inscribed party members.

The dominant elites of the past thirty years may not have been consciously totalitarian but the antisemitic mobs which occupied university campuses, or London’s streets over the past two years did not come out of thin air. Do her reflections on the power and influence of the elites of her own time not sound familiar to us relative to the cancellations, no-platforming, silencing and destruction of freedom of speech in our time – not to mention their insane efforts to redefine and obliterate our very understanding of human nature?

Furthermore, she explained, this attraction for the elite is as important a clue to the understanding of totalitarian movements as their more obvious connection with the mob. It indicates the specific atmosphere, the general climate in which the rise of totalitarianism takes place. It should be remembered that the leaders of totalitarian movements and their sympathizers are, so to speak, older than the masses which they organize so that chronologically speaking the masses do not have to wait helplessly for the rise of their own leaders in the midst of a decaying class society of which they are the most outstanding product.

The ultra progressive capture of our academic institutions is now providing the elders of the movement. Over a few decades this is what has generated the mobs of young people who in the past decade have torn apart whole city districts and occupied campuses today.

Reflecting on what prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world, she argues, is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever growing masses of our century. 

The merciless process into which totalitarianism drives and organizes the masses looks like a suicidal escape from this reality. The ‘ice-cold reasoning’ and the ‘mighty tentacle’ of dialectics which ‘seizes you as in a vise’ appears like a last support in a world where nobody is reliable and nothing can be relied upon. It is the inner coercion whose only content is the strict avoidance of contradictions that seems to confirm a man’s identity outside all relationships with others. It fits him into the iron band of terror even when he is alone, and totalitarian domination tries never to leave him alone except in the extreme situation of solitary confinement. 

She explains how the process works by destroying all space between men and pressing men against each other, even the productive potentialities of isolation are annihilated; by teaching and glorifying the logical reasoning of loneliness where man knows that he will be utterly lost if ever he lets go of the first premise from which the whole process is being started, even the slim chances that loneliness may be transformed into solitude and logic into thought are obliterated.

 If this practice is compared with that of tyranny, it seems as if a way had been found to set the desert itself in motion, to let loose a sand storm that could cover all parts of the inhabited earth. The conditions under which we exist today in the field of politics are indeed threatened by these devastating sand storms. 

But sand storms are not permanent phenomena. They are destructive but temporary. Their danger, she says,  is not that they might establish a permanent world. Totalitarian domination, like tyranny. bears the germs of its own destruction.

The first part of her study deals with the growth of  secular antisemitism. The second part deals with the nature, legacy and corrupting nature of late 19th  and early 20th  century imperialism. In the third part she shows how the combined and intertwining legacy of these two fatal realities morph into the horror of totalitarianism.

The flawed notions of the rights of man which were championed by Tom Paine et al flourished over the nineteenth century. Add to that the plague of antisemitism and imperialism which spawned what she describes as ‘race-thinking’. This in turn undermined the historic model of the nation state and the sense of community which it nourished. The replacement of the old stabilising notion of the nation state generated pan-ethnic consciousness (Germanic, Slav and Russian) which in turn created stateless populations – including Jews – which found no home in those entities. Those entities themselves were partly driven by a desire for conquest and to create new empires. Out of all this emerged classless mobs worshiping a new notion of political power. These became easy fodder to nourish the central and eastern European totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.

She makes an interesting observation on how the Mediterranean nations somehow partially escaped the frenzy.

The only countries where to all appearances state idolatry and nation worship were not yet outmoded and where nationalist slogans against the ‘suprastate’ forces were still a serious concern of the people were those Latin-European countries like Italy and, to a lesser degree, Spain and Portugal, which had actually suffered a definite hindrance to their full national development through the power of the Church. It was partly due to this authentic element of belated national development and partly to the wisdom of the Church, which very sagely recognized that Fascism was neither anti-Christian nor totalitarian in principle.

The real seed-bed of totalitarianism was Central and Eastern Europe. In the 1920s and 1930s, after the first World War, the chaos among the displaced populations, the ethnic majorities and the corresponding minorities, produced all sorts of conflicts, requiring the setting of new state boundaries. Ireland’s border predicament was a side show in comparison with what mainland Europe was experiencing. But the growth of race-thinking added more poison to the mix. Europe was awash with masses of stateless people. The League of Nations tried to institute what were called ‘minority treaties’ to establish some kind of human rights for these people. They can only be seen as dismal failures.

Add to this confusion the flawed notion of human rights without any philosophical or anthropological foundation – who has them, and on what basis?  In principle the right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself. But in practice this abstract notion of humanity guaranteed nothing.

The crimes against human rights, which have become a specialty of totalitarian regimes, can always be justified by the pretext that right is equivalent to being good or useful for the whole in distinction to its parts. A conception of law which identifies what is right with the notion of what is good for – the individual, or the family, or the people, or the largest number – becomes inevitable once the absolute and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature have lost their authority. 

Here, in the problems of factual reality, we are confronted with one of the oldest perplexities of political philosophy, which could remain undetected only so long as a stable Christian theology provided the framework for all political and philosophical problems, but which long ago caused Plato to say: ‘Not man, but a god, must be the measure of all things.’

She concludes that these facts and reflections offer what seems an ironical, bitter, and belated confirmation of the famous arguments with which Edmund Burke opposed the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man. They appear to buttress his assertion that human rights were an abstraction, that it was much wiser to rely on an entailed inheritance of rights which one transmits to one’s children like life itself, and to claim one’s rights to be the ‘rights of an Englishman’ rather than the inalienable rights of man.” (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France). According to Burke, the rights which we enjoy spring from within the nation, so that neither natural law, nor divine command, nor any concept of mankind such as Robespierre’s ‘human race,’ the sovereign of the earth, are needed as a source of law.  (Robespierre, Speeches. Speech of April 24, 1793.)

She asserts that the pragmatic soundness of Burke’s concept seems to be beyond doubt in the light of our manifold experiences. Not only did loss of national rights in all instances entail the loss of human rights. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human. And in view of objective political conditions, it is hard to say how the concepts of man upon which human rights are based – that he is created in the image of God (in the American formula), or that he is the representative of mankind, or that he harbors within himself the sacred demands of natural law (in the French formula) – could have helped to find a solution to the problem.

The survivors of the extermination camps, the inmates of concentration and internment camps, and even the comparatively happy stateless people could see without Burke’s arguments that the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human was their greatest danger.

But Arendt is not a pessimist. Her final judgement echoes – but in a more Judaeo-Christian way – the final frames of Stanley Kubrick’s  masterpiece imagining of the future of humanity, 2001: S Space Odyssey, where the ‘star child’ enters the edge of the screen suggesting a new beginning for mankind.
She reminds us that there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only ‘message’ which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est – that a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.

The Existential Bob Dylan

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Nobel Prizes are always reported in the international media. In some years we hear more about them than  than in others. Very few occasions have matched the sensation caused in 2017 by the announcement  that the prize for literature was being awarded to Robert Zimmerman, better known to most of us as Bob Dylan.

The Swedish Academy, was entrusted by Alfred Nobel with the onerous task of distributing annually from his largesse, a cache of very valuable prizes. These were to go to recipients working in a range of disciplines across the world whose work was for the good of humanity. It is fair to say that the Nobel Prize is second to none in terms of the prestige it bestows on those who win it each year. 

In awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature to Dylan in that year the Academy not only broke a mould but did the world of literature a great favour. It freed our imagination from a concept of literature which previous categorisations had imposed on it and us.

There was some shock at the decision. I don’t think there was outrage – and no previous recipients handed back their prizes as OBE recipients from another time did when the Beatles received their honour from Queen Elizabeth. After dealing with the initial surprise at  the award, anyone familiar with Dylan’s oeuvre realised that he thoroughly deserved it. It was only right that his insight, his command of language and his imaginative explorations of the human condition, be recognised, rewarded and celebrated.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary considers literature to be “writings having excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas of permanent or universal interest.” Britannica notes that the term literature has” traditionally been applied to those imaginative works of poetry and prose distinguished by the intentions of their authors and the perceived aesthetic excellence of their execution.” The 19th-century critic Walter Pater referred to “the matter of imaginative or artistic literature” as a “transcript, not of mere fact, but of fact in its infinitely varied forms.” Dylan’s work fits all these descriptions. The fact that he mostly sings just adds to the power and beauty of his expression.

Dylan, as a condition for receiving his prize, was obliged by the Academy’s rules to “deliver a lecture within six months of the official ceremony.”  This he duly did. Describing the entire extraordinary event as “the Dylan adventure”, the Academy’s late secretary, Sara Danius, commented, “The speech is extraordinary and, as one might expect, eloquent.” 

Dylan concluded his lecture by saying that “Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days. I return once again to Homer, who says, ‘Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story'”.

It is notable that The Odyssey was composed to be sung. Later it was read, but when it was first composed, it was intended for delivery by a trained bard to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument resembling a lyre. Would Homer have been denied a Nobel Prize on that basis? Surely not.

 In his lecture, Dylan talks about the impact that three important books made on him: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Homer’s Odyssey. 

Bob Dylan has been writing songs all his life. But he has also been thinking about songs, others’ songs, all his life. In 2022 his reflections on the songs which have dominated or influenced popular culture in the 20th and 21st centuries were made public in a remarkable volume published by Simon and Schuster. Entitled The Philosophy of Modern Song, the book is almost a hybrid of a True Detective volume and a work of existential philosophy. A friend of mine, after looking at the visual appearance said he thought it wasn’t worth a second look. But when I quoted a few passages from it he changed his mind.

Dylan seldom, if ever, talks about his own songs. What he has written he has written. They speak for themselves, like all great art. On interpretations of his work – of which there are multitudes – he remains silent, with the exception implied in his famous self-description as “a song and dance man”.

But this silence does not apply to what he has been listening to in the broad popular musical culture of the past century – and even beyond. In The Philosophy of Modern Song we have an extraordinary collection of reflections  on  songs from what is often called The Great American Songbook – with a handful of British for good measure, –  ranging from a haunting song by Stephen Foster from the 19th century down to the last years of the 20th. From each song, some of them apparently banal, sometimes briefly, sometimes at more length, he draws out existential interpretations of our times and the world in which we live.

Bob Dylan’s Philosophy of Modern Song is mainly a celebration of a culture – or a segment of our culture. It revisits sixty-six popular songs which in different ways reflect the simple joys and sorrows, the worries and anguish of a people – mainly North American – in the 20th century. Some of the songs were heard, even heard across the wider world, by millions and were the products of a multi-million dollar entertainment industry. Dylan does not evaluate them on any commercial basis and the songs which were never part of that exploitation, those heard by downtrodden people in impoverished communities, were of equal interest to him in articulating what he saw as this philosophy of our time.

For example, in a rather harrowing reading of a rather dark song called Take Me From The Garden of Evil, he begins calmly enough but then rises to a Jerimiad of existential anguish with echos of Psalm 37 and reminiscent of anything in Albert Camus’ bleaker novels. Take your pick. Inevitably all this is written in Dylan’s own inimitable style.

He begins, where the song does, telling us about the world we would like to live in and in which many people do:

“What you’d like to see is a neighbourly face, a lovely charming face. Someone on the up and up, a straight shooter ethical and fit. Someone in an attractive place, hospitable, a hole in the wall, a honky-tonk with home cooking. Nobody needs to be in a quick rush, no emphasis on speediness, everybody’s going to measure their steps. Your little girl will support you; she waits on you hand and foot, and she sides with you at all times.”

Then he looks at another world, negative and all too familiar, from which the songwriter is praying to escape – and in the end appears to have the determination to do so.

“But you’re in limbo, and you’re shouting at anyone who’ll listen, to take you out of this garden of evil. Get you away from the gangsters and psychopaths, this menagerie of wimps and yellow-bellies. You want to be emancipated from all the hokum. You don’t want to daydream your life away, you want to get beyond the borderlands and you’ve been ruminating too long.

You’ve been suspended in mid-air, but now the stage is set, and you’re going to go in any direction available, and get away from this hot house that has gone to the dogs. The one that represses you, you want to get away from this corrupt neck of the woods, as far away as possible from this debauchery. You want to ride on a chariot through the pillars of light… put money on it. You overpower your fears and wipe them out, anything to get out of this garden of evil. This landscape of hatred and horror, this murky haze that fills you with disgust.

You want to be piggy backed into another dimension where your body and mind can be restored. If you stay here your dignity is at risk, you’re one step away from becoming a spiritual monster, and that’s a no-no.

You’re appealing to someone, imploring someone to get you out of here. You’re talking to yourself, hoping you don’t go mad.

You’ve got to move across the threshold but be careful. You might have to put up a fight, and you don’t want to get into it already defeated.”

That’s at the dark end of his reflections but who can say that it does not resonate with our experience of dimensions of the world we see around us?

On a more sublime and sad level we have this enigmatic reflection on the reality of a society which has side-lined God in its reading of the human condition. In his reading of a poignant  little love song from 1972, If You Don’t Know By Now, he writes,

“One of the reasons people turn away from God is because religion is no longer in the fabric of their lives. It is presented as a thing that must be journeyed to as a chore – it’s Sunday, we have to go to church. Or, it is used as a weapon of threat by political nutjobs on either side of every argument. But religion used to be in the water we drank, the air we breathed. Songs of praise were as spine-tingling as, and in truth the basis of, songs of carnality. Miracles illuminated behavior and weren’t just spectacle.

“It wasn’t always a seamless interaction. Supposedly, early readers of the Bible were disturbed by the harshness of God’s behavior against Job, but the prologue with God’s wager with Satan about Job’s piety in the face of continued testing, added later, makes it one of the most exciting and inspirational books of the Old or New Testament.

“Context is everything. Helping people fit things into their lives is so much more effective than slamming them down their throats. Here’s another way to look at a love song.”

He could be searing in his reading of our time as well as benign and optimistic. God is present in Dylan’s vision of the world and the things that offend God are real to him.

On the subject of what America has done to the institutions of marriage and the family he offers us what is perhaps his most bitter and telling reflection. He jumps off on this one from a platform offered by a mock cynical Johnny Taylor song called It’s Cheaper to Keep Her. 

He writes that soul records, like Hillbilly, Blues, Calypso, Cajun, Polka, Salsa, and other indigenous forms of music, contain wisdom that the upper crust often gets in academia. The so-called school of the streets is a real thing. “While Ivy League graduates talk about love in a rush of quatrains detailing abstract qualities and gossamer attributes, folks from Trinidad to Atlanta, Georgia, sing of the cold hard facts of life. The divorce now becomes his target.

“Divorce is a ten-billion-dollar-a-year industry. And that’s without renting a hall, hiring a band or throwing bouquets. Even without the cake, that’s a lot of dough.

If you’re lucky enough to get into this racket, you can make a fortune manipulating the laws and helping destroy relationships between people who at one point or another swore undying love to one another. Nobody knows how to pull the plug on this golden goose, nor do they really want to. Most especially not those who risk nothing but who keep raking it in.

“Marriage and divorce are currently played out in the courtrooms and on the tongues of gossips; the very nature of the institution has become warped and distorted, a gotcha game of vitriol and betrayal. How many divorce lawyers are parties to this betrayal between two supposedly civilized people? The honest answer is all of them. This would be an unimportant economic slugfest if it was just between the estranged parties.

“After all, marriage is a pretty simple contract – till death do you part. Right there is the reason that God-fearing members of the community regularly gave divorced folks the skunk-eye. If they were willing to disavow that basic contract, what makes you think they won’t disavow anything and everything?

“That’s why historically, if you were a divorced person nobody trusted you.

Marriage is the only contract that can be dissolved because interest fades or because someone purposefully behaves badly. If you’re an engineer for Google, for example, you can’t just wander over to another company and start working there because it’s suddenly more attractive. There’s promises and responsibilities and the new company would have to buy out your contract. But people seldom think logically when breaking up a home.

“Married or not, however, a parent has a duty to support a child. And this matters a whole lot more than divvying up summer homes. Ultimately, marriage is for the sake of those children. 

“But divorce lawyers don’t care about familial bonds; they are, by definition, in the destruction business. They destroy families. How many of them are at least tangentially responsible for teen suicides and serial killers? Like generals who don’t have to see the boys they send to war, they feign innocence with blood on their hands.

“They say married by the Bible, divorced by the law-but will your lawyer talk to God for you? The laws of God override the laws of man every time but clearing the moneylenders from the temple is one thing – getting them out of your life is another. If people could get away from the legal costs, they might have a better chance to keep their heads above water.

“And then there are prenuptial agreements. You might as well play blackjack against a crooked casino. Two people at the height of their ardor lay a bet that those feelings won’t last. They pay lawyers to make sure that whoever has the most assets has that money protected when they start getting mad at each other. Now, those same lawyers will tell you that it’s just a precaution and in many cases these agreements never have to get implemented. But look a little closer and what you realize is these lawyers have even figured out how to get paid way in advance, and indeed, in lieu of a divorce.”

The LA Times and other bastions of liberal progressives did not like all that of course. For them it was misogynistic and backward looking. Dylan, as always, is fearless. While on many occasions he defended those treated unjustly –  like the unjustly convicted ‘Hurricane’ Carter in Hurricane – he never did subscribe to any ideology. It was said recently in a Free Press column by Michael Moynihan that the break between him, Pete Seeger, and the folk movement at the Newport Festival had more to do with his failure to subscribe to their socialism than with electricity.

In The Philosophy, writing about a song called “Old Violin” – sung by the beleaguered and tragic Johnny Paycheck – he reflects: The extended metaphor of obsolescence, of the final go-round, is so vivid, yet so simple, the words so inseparable from Johnny’s performance, that knowing the story does not diminish the song at all. We all feel the pathos of the story. People thought of Johnny Paycheck as a lost cause. That name had nothing to do with what we call pay cheques. It is a genuine name of Polish origin. “But time and again he proved them wrong; he was just like that old violin, a Stradivarius no less, maybe the one that Paganini played. This is as gallant, generous, and faithful a performance as you’ll ever hear.

“This is not always the case. Polio victim Doc Pomus was in a wheelchair at his wedding, watching his bride dance with his brother, while he wrote the lyrics to Save the Last Dance for Me. As amazing and heart breaking as this story is, one can argue that it diminishes it as a song because it takes what used to be a universal message of love and replaces it with a very specific set of images. It’s hard to have your own romance supersede Doc’s once you know the poignant backstory.” This , he also considers, may be the reason so few songs that were made during the video age went on to become standards; we are locked into someone else’s messaging of the lyrics. But miraculously, “Old Violin” transcends.

And finally, an ironic little take on the madness of materialism and our fetishistic preoccupations with personal appearance:

Blue Suede Shoes, written by Carl Perkins’ but better known in Elvis’ rendering, is the handwriting on the wall loaded with menacing meaning. That handwriting allusion is a biblical reference to  Belshazzar’s fateful feast in the Book of Daniel. As Dylan sees it, it is a signal to gate crashers, snoops, and invaders – keep your nose out of here, mind your own business and whatever you do stay away from my shoes.

He reads it like this: “You’d like to be on good footing with everyone, but let’s face it, there’s a harshness to your nature that might go unsuspected and it can be downright nasty when it comes to your shoes. Especially when it comes to your shoes.

“Your shoes are your pride and joy, sacred and dear, your reason for living, and anyone who scrapes or bruises them is putting himself into jeopardy, accidentally or out of ignorance it doesn’t matter. It’s the one thing in life you won’t forgive. If you don’t believe me, step on them by all means-you won’t like what happens.

René Girard, The Golden Bough and Mimesis

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

René GIRARD, PART 2

René Girad was born into a Catholic family in Avignon in France on 25 December 1923. His father, Joseph Girard, was a historian.

René studied medieval history at the École des Chartes, Paris. In 1947, Girard went to Indiana University. He was to spend most of his career in the United States. Although his research was in history, he also taught French literature. A multi-disciplinary character was a marked feature of his academic interests. This facilitated his occupation of positions in a variety of prestigious institutions – at Duke University, Bryn Mawr College and Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where he became a full professor in 1961.

In 1981, Girard was appointed Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization at Stanford University, where he remained until his retirement in 1995 and subsequently in an active emeritus role. On 17 March 2005, Girard was elected to the Académie française.

Throughout these years he published just short of 30 books, covering all the interlocking disciplines which were the subjects of his thought and research,

Girard’s reading of Dostoevsky, in particular, The Brothers Karamazov and The Possessed (Demons) – especially the deathbed. conversion of Stepan Verkhovensky in that book – were influential in his conversion from agnostic to Christianity. But equally important was where  his reading of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough led him.

Girard read and studied Frazer’s book before his conversion to Christianity. He suspected flaws in Frazer’s reading of mythology and how it contradicted  the Bible.

In The Golden Bough Frazer catalogued all the mythic scapegoats of the ancient stories. But he confused the scapegoating of Christ with the ancient mythical scapegoats. Frazer failed to see that Christ was an innocent victim of scapegoating.

From his murderers’ point of view his death would save the people, as Caiphas said in his unconsciously prophetic utterance. Girard says that Frazer was perfectly right to point to the similarities between the ancient myths and Christianity – in both instances you have a victim who is killed by an entire community. In the ancient myths the victims were eventually seen as gods. In Christ’s case the victim was in fact God incarnate.

“But what Frazier didn’t see, which is the simplest thing of all and should convince everybody immediately, if they were honest, that Christianity is very different from mythology – while being the same. It is exactly the same situation but it is very different because Christianity tells you that Christ was innocent whereas all myths tell you that the victim is guilty….People don’t see that this is the first time in the history of mankind that a myth occurs where the victim is not guilty but innocent, sent by God himself.”

Answering why Christ’s death on the Cross is a saving event, Girard explains that “If you read the ‘mythical’ situation the way I do you can see there is something that is not purely human about it. In classical mythology we are offered all these victims and we take them for culprits, and so forth. In the case of Christianity there are a few disciples who say ‘no, no, He is not guilty’, who maintain to the end that he is innocent. Therefore they say the truth simply. They say a truth which is anthropological before being religious, but which is the same thing.”

Girard points out that Christ’s death on the Cross frees humankind from this deep, profound, inescapable and largely hidden cycle of the scapegoating impulse in which his mythologies imprisoned him. Scapegoating in biblical accounts goes back to the story of Cain and Abel and features in many other biblical accounts – for example in the suffering endured by the prophets. Christianity asserts with certainty that it is the only true religion. It tells the truth about man and about God.  In an interview with Peter Robinson of Stanford’s Hoover Institute, Girard commented, ”Very few people take this statement seriously, as you well know. They should take that literally.” Answering the question as to why don’t they see that Christianity is different, he replies, “They do not want it. Christianity destroys mythology.”

Girard’s rebuttal of Frazer’s errors is complex, the details of which we do not have the space to unravel here. But at the root of it he finds  “That incoherence traditionally attributed to religious ideas…associated with the theme of the scapegoat. Frazer treats his subject at length; his writing is remarkable for its abundance of description and paucity of explanation. Frazer refuses to concern himself with the formidable forces at work behind religious significations, and his openly professed contempt for religious themes. (This) protects him from  unwelcome discoveries.” 

At the heart of Frazer’s total mis-reading of the Passion of Christ is his rejection of the sacrifice at its heart. Girard comments that anyone who tries to subvert the sacrificial principle by turning to derision invariably becomes its unwitting accomplice. Frazer is no exception. “His work in treating the act of sacrificial substitution as if it were pure fantasy, a non phenomenon, recalls nothing so much as the platitudes of second-rate theologians.” 

Because of a wilful blindness, Girard alleges, modern thinkers continue to see religion as an isolated, wholly fictitious phenomenon cherished only by a few backward peoples or milieus. And these same thinkers can now project upon religion alone the responsibility for a violent projection of violence that truly pertains to all societies including our own. This attitude is seen at its most flagrant in the writing of Frazer. Along with his rationalist colleagues and disciples, he was perpetually engaged in a ritualistic expulsion and consummation of religion itself, which he used as a sort of scapegoat for all human thought.

Elsewhere Girard argued that the historical phenomenon of Christians warring with Christians was not in fact a Christian phenomenon but its contrary.

Girard’s second revolutionary idea is that of mimetic desire, that is desire driven by the impulse to imitate another or the other. Mimesis = imitation. This can be good or bad. In Sacred Scripture there are two short passages which lead us to a consideration of René Girard’s theory. By this theory he potentially de-fangs the pernicious analysis of human desire inflicted on us by Sigmund Freud.

In the third letter of St John we are exhorted,

“Beloved, do not imitate evil but imitate

good. He who does good is of God; he who does evil has

not seen God.”

In the letter of St James we are asked:

“What causes wars, and what causes fighting among you? Is it not your passions that are at war in your members? You desire and do not have; so you kill.

And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war.”

Girard identifies a triangular relationship in desire – object, model and subject are the same. In his interview with Girard, Peter Robinson puts this in the simplest of terms: 

Serpent, Eve, apple?

Girard accepts this. “Serpent in the mimetic theory of desire is an image of the mediator, the one who directs the subject towards the bad desire.

The churches, you know, who know what they are talking about, better than most people think, know that example is the key to bad as well as good behaviour. This is what I call mimetic desire.”  In the pursuit of illicit desires this is what we call  the occasion of sin.

The imitative nature of desire will often lead to conflict, sometimes violent and catastrophic conflict. Mythology warns us of this: Paris desires Helen and makes Menelaus his enemy and the end of it all is the destruction of Troy.

In this reading of our nature and the process of desiring, Girard identifies good and bad desires – good desires leading to human fulfilment, bad desires leading to rivalry and conflict. One of the great classical spiritual books, Thomas a Kempis’, The Imitation of Christ, points us in the direction of God  – as all great spiritual writing does, encouraging us to do as St James did.

But as Girard points out, people polarise around objects of desire. This is true even for food, shelter, places where you can live and so on. But because of limited availability, scarcity, conflict ensues. Desire to have what the other has, and which we have no right to have, makes for conflict, envy, aggressive attempts to acquire it.

Gil Ballie, is a lay theologian and one of the leading interpreters of Girard’s thought. He summarises mimetic attraction  and its importance in terms of the current crisis in our culture.

We are, he says, in a civilizational crisis, one that is the outworking of anthropological mistakes that have long festered. Increasingly in the history of Western culture, mistakes which we have forgotten or ignored or misconstrued. Among these he lists mimesis, but also  “the most essential fact of human existence, namely, religious longing.” 

“This feature of the human condition is vastly more important than the opposable thumb or the discovery of fire. Our mimetic predisposition cannot be overlooked without catastrophic consequences, nor can its role in mankind’s religious life be discounted. The great question is: how is this religious acuity awakened and thereafter properly ordered? No small number of people have tried to dispense with it as the residue of an earlier stage of human affairs. It is only a matter of time, however, before that religious longing is transferred to ideologies that promise to relieve the boredom of not having a real religion, ideologies that exonerate the violence of their adherents.” 

Baillie cites a moment in the tragic life of the poet Sylvia Plath which tragically illustrates our emptiness and our struggle to escape from it. He quotes a passage in Plath’s journals where she longs for God and for purpose in her life. In desperation, she toys with the possibility of committing herself completely to some political “cause” with a capital “C,” the violence of which could be justified as a “splurge of altruism.” Countless people today, he says,  are doing exactly that. Plath’s final desperate response was suicide.

“There is one feature of this quintessential religious longing that must be recognized: it is always mediated. It is awakened by another or others. The entire biblical canon and the history of the Church provide the guidelines for properly channeling this religious longing, and it does so by showing us countless examples of sinners and saints whose lives and legends convey something about how our religious longing might properly be channelled and ordered.”

In the final part of this series we will look at Girard’s personal journey and how his conversion and deep religious life brought him and us to an understanding of mankind’s deepest aspirations and how to fulfil them.

René Girard and the test of history

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments

(Part One)

The final years of the nineteen hundreds and the early years of the succeeding century produced two thinkers whose ideas had an enormous influence on our culture over the twentieth century, extending even into the present age.

Both were effectively enemies of religion, even  virulently so. One will be familiar to us, his name even having a byword status in our language. The other is not so familiar but, regardless of that, they both left a mark on our culture which did much to transform it from an essentially Christian one into a post Christian atheistic one.

The first of these is Sigmund Freud. The second is the anthropologist, Sir James Frazer. Freud’s legacy is a vastly more extensive one than that of Frazer – and not malign in all its aspects. But his reading of man’s nature and his emphasis on sexual appetite as the root of our desires has been both a determinant of the under-belly of our popular culture and a potent force destroying many of the noble values which have characterised our civilisation for millennia.

Sir James Frazer’s seminal work is The Golden Bough, famous enough and influential enough to be very meaningfully referenced in Francis Ford Coppola’s film, Apocalypse Now. Frazer is not taken very seriously by professional anthropologists but that does not diminish his influence on our culture. Frazer’s destructive idea helped sow the seeds of twentieth century agnosticism and atheism.

Frazer presented The Golden Bough as an exhaustive study of human mythology and how it reveals to us the deeper aspects of anthropology. In particular he focused on the pervasive phenomenon of scapegoating as the cathartic  agent which rescued human societies from one catastrophe after another. Think of the myth of Oedipus here. Frazer’s grave and destructive error, however, was to include the scapegoating, suffering and death of Jesus as just one more myth in the long catalogue which he assembled. He failed to see the radical difference between the scapegoating of Christ and all the others in his list – remember, Caiphas did present Christ to the Sanhedrin as such. 

“Nor do you understand that it is expedient and politically advantageous for you that one man die for the people, and that the whole nation not perish” (John 11:50).

But neither Caiphas nor Frazer understood the true meaning of Christ’s voluntary sacrifice for the redemption of mankind.

There is one twentieth century thinker  who many regard as one who by the end of this century will be regarded as one of the greatest influences on our time and whose thought will explode the fallacies perpetrated by, among others, both Frazer and Freud. His reading of man as man and our relationship with God and the world will tower head and shoulders over all others. He will do so because he directly confronts Freud’s corrupt reading of the roots of human desire.  He also demolishes Frazer’s simplistic confusion of the phenomenon of mythological scapegoating with Christ’s truly salvific sacrifice on the Cross.

This man was René Girard (1923-2014). Girard was a man whom Bishop Robert Barron describes as one of the great Catholic philosophers of our time and predicts that in the future his influence will be regarded as that of a modern Church Father.  Girard was a member of the Académie Française, taught in the universities of Indiana, Johns Hopkins and finally in Stanford. Barron classifies two types of academics, those who beguile you with brilliant ideas and those who will shake our world. Girard, he says, was one of the latter. The Canadian sociologist, Charles Taylor, writes of the “ground-breaking work” of  Girard. In reading contemporary attempts of our efforts to confront our society’s problems it is not unusual to find writers talk of ‘Girardian’ approaches to these.

But his influence is multifaceted and penetrates into the secular world in a remarkable way. He has influenced some of the leading movers and shakers in Silicon Valley – people like Peter Theil and Mark Andriessen. J.D. Vance has attributed his conversion to Catholicism to reading Girard. Thiel, founder of PayPal and now one of the West’s leading public intellectuals studied under Girard at Stanford. He has said that Girard has had a tremendous impact on his life, and considers the author’s book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World           to be Girard’s masterpiece.

Theil says “Girard ranges over everything: every book, every myth, every culture — and he always argues boldly. That made him stand out against the rest of academia, which was and still is divided between two approaches: specialized research on trivial questions and grandiose but nihilistic claims that knowledge is impossible. Girard is the opposite of both: He makes sweeping arguments about big questions based on a view of the whole world. So even when you set aside the scandalous fact that Girard takes Christianity seriously, there is already something heroic and subversive about his work.”

Bari Weis, former Wall Street Journal and New York Times writer, and now upsetting mainstream media’s applecart as founder-editor of The Free Press, published a series  recently listing nine twentieth century prophets. Girard was one of them. The piece on Girard was by one of his recent biographers, Cynthia Haven.

Haven reflected on how  “Today, a single tweet could wreck a career. It could even bring down a government, if the stars are aligned. Mobs gather online instantly, ideologies form seemingly overnight, and cancel culture punishes those who dare dissent. This precarious, pernicious world is the one we live in now. But decades before anyone had heard of “doxxing” or “downvoting” or “dragging,” a French literary scholar at Stanford, born more than 100 years ago, warned of what was to come. He foresaw the perils of combining human nature with a globally connected world.”

“When the whole world is globalized, you’re going to be able to set fire to the whole thing with a single match,” predicted Girard. 

In Girard’s deep and penetrating study of the nature of human desire – forget Freud’s blinkered sexual preoccupations – he explored envy, imitation, crowd behaviour, and reciprocal violence. Starting in the 1950s, he first developed his insights not by poring through datasets or running a social science lab but, surprisingly, from a deep study of great literature.  Great novels tell us the truth, he said. In them we see the truest reflections of men and women’s inner being.

Girard was not a superficial optimist. Neither was he a grim pessimist. He was a man of Faith and Hope but he did take the apocalyptic passages of Sacred Scripture seriously. He looked at the point at which we have now arrived in human history and worried deeply about what he saw unfolding. He takes very seriously the apocalyptic passages in the New Testament. For example the second letter of St Peter:

“Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of persons ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be kindled and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire!  But according to his promise we wait for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.

“Therefore, beloved, since you wait for these, be zealous to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace.  And count the forbearance of our Lord as salvation. ”

Girard has written, “History you might say is a test for mankind but we know very well that mankind is failing that test.” (quote from his book, Battling To The End). He explains what he means by this: “Mankind is failing that test because mankind has the truth in the reality of Christianity, which is there. This truth has been there for 2000 years, and instead of moving ahead and becoming more widespread it is becoming more restricted.”

But he goes on to say that when the anti-religious are attacking Christianity, it is not the essence pf Christianity they are attacking but their own false reading of it. What is really going on is an effort to restore a mythical pagan world.

Girard reflects that when he was a child, before the invention of the atom bomb priests always talked in church of the apocalyptic texts, particularly before Advent, the last Sunday of Pentecost time. He speaks of how they impressed him. “In a way the inspiration of my whole work is there. I have been talking about these texts all the time.”

“In some way the gospels and scripture are predicting that mankind will fail the test of history since they end with an eschatological theme, literally the end of the world”.

Girard’s calm rational vision of the ‘end times” are reminiscent of what Romano Guardini wrote about the Book of Revelation

“The apocalyptical is that which reveals temporality’s true face when it has been demasked by the eternal. It was given to St. John to behold this. No pleasurable favor, this gift of the visionary eye. He who has it can no longer look upon the things of existence without trembling at sight of ‘the hair’ by which they hang. He lives under the awful pressure of constant uncertainty. Nothing is safe. The borders between time and eternity melt away. From all sides eternity’s overwhelming reality closes in upon him, mounting from the depths, plunging from the heights. For the visionary life ceases to be peaceful and simple. He is required to live under duress, that others may sense how things really stand with them; that they not only learn that this or that is to take place—still less the futile details of the time and circumstances—but that they may possess the essential knowledge of what all existence undergoes at the approach of the eternal. Only he reads the Apocalypse properly who leaves it with some sense of this.”

In exploring the errors of our time and in presenting his interpretation of our true nature  Girard seems to be offering us a way out  of our contemporary self-destructive maze. What that way is, based on the twin pillars of his study of the process of human desiring and the truly redemptive sacrifice of Jesus Christ which Frazer denied, will be approached in part two of this article.

“Atheism was the centre from which ran out all the mischiefs and villainies” of the French Revolution

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments

EDMUND BURKE AND THE WAR ON THE ORIGINS OF SECULARISM – Part Two

The Goddess of Reason enthroned by the revolutionaries on the High Altar of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris

Edmund Burke’s battles with what he saw as the malign interpretations in early Protestantism of mankind’s relations with the Creator is the focus of this second part of our reflections on the early life of this great Irishman.

Edmund Burke can be seen as an early warrior in the crucial confrontation of our civilisation with the degenerating phenomenon of secularism. Richard Bourke’s splendid book Edmund Burke: Empire and Revolution  has a much wider focus and constitutes what was   described by the late Seamus Deane, himself a Burke scholar, as “the finest of all books on Edmund Burke”. I hope I can be forgiven for a degree of paraphrasing of Professor Bourke’s words in what follows.

The Catholic influences in Burke’s life are not over-emphasised by Professor Bourke. Nevertheless they were very real and cannot but be taken into account in any assessment of his overall grasp of the Christian faith. The backdrop of the Penal Laws to his life and the lives of many in his wider family, and to his Catholic friends and associates, inevitably had a bearing on what he could write and say. 

The author tells us that Burke’s sister, Juliana, married Patrick William French, a member of a prominent Catholic family from Galway. Burke himself was to marry Jane Nugent, daughter of the Catholic physician Christopher Nugent, based in Bath, whose son is also known to have married a Nagle from Ballyduff. Burke remained on intimate terms throughout his life with Richard Hennessy, the Irish Catholic brandy merchant, whose family had intermarried for generations with the Nagles. His “strong and affectionate memory” of Cork families like the Barretts and the Roches is similarly evident in much of his correspondence.  

We are told how Burke’s intimacy with his Nagle relations first developed during the five years  or so that he spent in the Blackwater Valley, beginning around 1737. Having received his earliest education from his mother and subsequently from assorted instructors, Burke was sent to reside with the Nagles in Ballyduff. He went to school in nearby Monanimy Castle, where he was first taught Latin by a Mr. O’Halloran, the village schoolmaster.  

O’Halloran’s influence shows in Burke’s familiarity with Virgil. In a letter of that time he quotes the classical Master’s tribute paid in the Georgics to “the pathways of the stars and the heavens, the various lapses of the sun and the various labours of the moon”. In a letter to his lifelong friend from his school days, Richard Shackleton, revealing a Christian sense of wonder, he wrote:

“What grander Idea can the mind of man form to itself than a prodigious, glorious, and firy globe hanging in the midst of an infinite and boundless space surrounded with bodies of whom our earth is scarcely any thing in comparison . . . held tight to their respective orbits. . . by the force of the Creator’s Almighty arm.”

In a debate in Trinity in 1749, talking about the Sermon on the Mount, he spoke of how the Christian religion marked an advance on heathen morality by educating the feelings of the heart, perhaps sensing the same idea embraced in John Henry Newman’s wonderful phrase, “heart speaks unto heart”.

Burke’s friend, Richard Shackleton, was a committed Quaker coming from that famous Ballitore family whose school Edmund attended before Trinity, also in the company of Richard. The author notes how Burke was aware of the “Different Roads” towards Christian truth which both he and his friend earnestly pursued, and reflected on the “melancholy” fact that there existed “Diversities of Sects and opinions among us.” He lamented the reality of Christian disunity.  

For Burke, the author notes, toleration among Christians was a mark of piety, although his attitude to infidels was another matter. His hostility to atheists would reach a crescendo in the 1790s in connection with the French Revolution: “Atheism,” he said, “was the centre from which ran out all their mischiefs and villainies.” Beginning in the 1790s, he vociferously denounced the “enlightened” ideals of the Revolution. His intention was to ridicule the presumptuousness of natural reason and the pretensions of moral philosophies based on hostility to organised religion. 

The shadow of the “wars of religion” of the 17th century, not to mention the Irish rebellion of 1641 and the Cromwellian aftermath loomed large over the thinkers of the early 18th century. For many, religion was a malign force and they looked for ways to remove that malignity. For others that was a false road to peace and simply reflected a total misunderstanding of what the Christian religion was about.

Professor Bourke explains: While toleration… seemed to him a basic ingredient of the Christian message, he thought the dogmatism of sceptical deists promoted persecution. It was a common refrain among polemical deists that religion was a source of bigotry, leading inexorably to sectarian prejudice and strife. Burke accepted  Bishop Berkeley’s inversion of this formula:

“Christianity was a morally emollient system of belief. Religion was commonly a pretext of animosity, but never its fundamental cause…the identification of blind fury with religious piety by sceptics was the product of a pernicious brand of fanaticism.”

In formulating his approach to reconciling the worlds of faith and reason he argued that eighteenth century irreligion replicated the same tendency and could only provoke more conflict. The deist project to realise the “freedom of philosophy” nurtured an uncritical belief in the oracles of  reason. With this certainty came contempt for the utility of social habit, and disregard for the natural moral sentiments of mankind. 

Burke saw no alternative but to take on the radical sceptics and deists who were hell-bent on not only denuding religion of all meaning and value, but on destroying civilisation in the process. One of the targets of the sceptics was the destruction of the idea of mystery in religion and the elevation of pure reason as the only source in which mankind could find the answer to the meaning of life.

Burke argued, according to Professor Bourke, that while the foolish might expect that they could penetrate metaphysical secrets, the wise were struck with awe in contemplating the operations of the universe. Burke settled on this perspective after an extensive study of theology. In the process he came to doubt the powers of pure reason. This did not imply a rejection of the utility of rational inquiry. It meant instead that Burke accepted the limitations on human knowledge.

Burke’s weapon of choice was a polemical and satirical tract entitled A Vindication of Natural Society in which he attempts to expose the limits of deism. To some it was confusing, missing the satirical thrust of the work – because it is not at all a “vindication”. It is an attack on religious scepticism as publicised by men like John Toland, Anthony Collins, Matthew Tindal and Viscount Bolingbroke. 

From it, if read accurately, Professor Bourke says that Burke emerges as a figure keen to credit natural sentiment and convinced of the ongoing bearing of divine providence on human life. The immortality of the soul and promise of an afterlife were essential  to his conception of providential theodicy.

He saw the work of those authors as a pernicious attempt to barbarise and denature man. In their different ways, Thomas Hobbes, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Collins and Bernard Mandeville had variously contributed to this process. In their hands, the ancient schools of philosophy had been resuscitated and debauched in the service of a dogmatic assault upon religion. 

For Burke the style of reasoning of these writers dismantled the foundation of all belief. Its influence would lead to the elimination of Christianity as well as to the destruction of society in general. 

In the 1750s, Burke challenged the deists’ denial of providence which he saw as something driven by a determination to annihilate mystery. In the process this threatened to dissolve all confidence in society, and everything that supported benign credulity and civilisation.  

One of them had declared “Where the mystery begins, religion ends.”

For Burke mystery could be credited in the absence of demonstration on the basis of reasonable faith. The idea of reasonable faith implied degrees of probability extending from moral certainty to extreme implausibility. For him, Christian revelation, while not a mathematical certainty, nonetheless commanded our assent. Although the content of scripture was often miraculous in nature, its credibility could not reasonably be doubted.  

Edmund Burke’s political thinking, his un-ideological and common sense approach to the way we can best organise the business of statecraft, is now at the heart of the thinking of many who are opposing the dying but still poisonous progressive liberalism that has infected our public squares.

But much of Burke’s clear-sighted analysis of the attacks on religion in his time – and what, prophetically, that to which he saw them leading – can still also be of use to us in our ongoing conflict with the secularist movement of our time with all its crazy progeny. 

(First published in print and online in Position Papers)

Next Week: The Journey of Thomas Stearns Eliot – Part One