Chapter 3 – A Mimetic Theory for the Everyman?
Using as example two prominent authors belonging to different sides and ages of the Mediterranean I tried to demonstrate that the mimetic nature of the relationship has been apparent to the brightest spirits on the two sides. But if this was fine in a world where masses basically did not had a chance to establish daily links and lived most of their lives in their own relatively isolated communities, it is no longer enough today where mutual exposure to other cultures has increased dramatically as well as the amount of damage that anyone can inflict thanks to the advances of technology. One finds on the Internet videos of Rene Girard conferences and speeches as well as instructions on how to build rudimentary bombs, so we need to develop ideas that can be used on both sides to spread the “Cervantes & Pamuk” fruitful understanding of mimesis rather than the nefarious “Bush vs Bin Laden” one. Ideally, the best way would be to have classes about mimetic theory in all high schools and we might well end up there over the next few decades however we can start working in that direction with maybe a more immediate approach. To do so, I think we can leverage on three key concepts, that is tradition, respect and challenge, already well known on both sides of this sea. Tradition: our “default configuration” to make sense of the world Let me introduce this by recalling the vivid memory of a young professor of religion in my youth in the highly politicized atmosphere of the state high schools of the 1980s in Italy. Climate was such that the hour of religious education almost invariably ended up in free-speech debates where the teacher basically kept spending his weekly hour of lecture answering more or less malicious questions around politics, history and morality from the classroom. One day, the topic “du jour” turned to tradition, with the classroom obviously pushing the idea that tradition was but a bunch of old ideas to be quickly dismissed if we ever wanted to embrace modernity and progress. Much to the surprise of the audience, the teacher actually said that tradition be better considered as any set of knowledge, beliefs and behaviors that every individual could not avoid being proposed by his/her environment to make sense of reality and start navigating his/her own journey in this world. And as during the journey these beliefs and evidences would be put to test, every individual would invariably modify to some extent this body of knowledge and attitude and re-transmit it to his/her descendants in a slightly modified way. If this is the definition, one student implied, then a Communist family should bring up their babies as Communists. His very consequential answer was: “Yes, absolutely”. In 25 years since that moment, I have not yet found a better definition. Whether we like it or not, we come up with a more or less defined set of values and beliefs. We can’t but use these tools to move in reality but as much as we would be insane to prejudicially look down on them, we need to recognize when they no longer serve us and we have to modify them before passing them on. So how does that translate in dealing with our rivals? Simply into recognizing that awkward or unacceptable behaviors in another tradition have probably valid backgrounds behind, and before indulging into an easy contempt, judgment must be constantly applied. At the same time, this is no excuse for going into easy relativism where anything can be justified on historical or cultural grounds: if we face more and more the same challenges we will have to look at each other tools and inevitably modify them to cope with the ever changing environment. “Girls of Riyadh” again gives a good example of this process at work. The four upper class Saudi girls of different cultural backgrounds in the key age between 15 and 25, show how core choices around vision of oneself and how to lead life are typically taken in mutual influence with the surrounding environment. Lamees is coming from a liberal Lebanese family and during high school time is by far the most provocative and outspoken, smuggling forbidden videotapes into high school. With the due proportions, she would typically smoke marijuana and have free sex in a Western setting. But again, it is structures rather than specific individual actions that matter here. Then we have Gamrah, fully conservative and aligned with family traditions, she accepts a combined family marriage as soon as she is out of high school. Michelle falls in in love and seeks to marry Faisal, a Saudi boy whose family ultimately opposes the marriage as the mother of Michelle is American and the father, although Muslim and occupying a very good social position, is not coming from the Saudi establishment. Finally, Sadeem is traditional in her will to form a perfect family and yet too explicit in the way she approaches boys, that are at once attracted and scared by her. Going through life, they all come to change their initial stance in response to circumstances and events: Lamees becomes a family mother model, starting to wear the veil even in relatively more liberal Jeddah. Gamrah, unfairly divorced by her husband that leaves her alone with her newborn kid, rejects a further proposal for marriage that would require her to leave her kid with her parents, challenging the will of her whole family. Michelle eventually opts for her Western side, showing up at Faisal marriage to mock her former boyfriend indecisiveness and eventually leaves the country to go working in Dubai. Consciously or not, traditions are influenced by circumstances, events and morph over time with the people, irrespective of their will or the will of the society surrounding them. All the better then to critically propose a set of traditional values, where critically here means literally giving evidence of the historical, religious, cultural and other reasons that led to a certain set of beliefs leaving the door open to change them and motivate the reasons that led to drop a certain set of values/behaviors, modify others and create new ones. Short, the process would take place anyway, in only a more unconscious and painful way. Then, better manage the changes in the open in full transparency. Respect This is nowadays a somehow abused word that way too often means “Turn your eye the other way, behave calmly and hide your contempt in public”. If you have to continue the exercise for a long time or the circumstances are particularly disturbing to your beliefs, it becomes “Tolerance”. No wonder it does not work, as it is trapped in the “Me good you evil” scheme. To try to overcome this, we should go back to the Latin etymology, that is the verb “respicere” which holds the two key ingredients of “looking at the other” with the “re” prefix that conveys at once the reflection back to us of our staring and our turning behind to look over our shoulder. In other words, I look at the other and by looking at the other I cannot help turning my eye back to me and wonder “Am I facing the same issues he is facing? And what ways have I come up to deal with it? And how come they are at times so strikingly different and so strikingly similar? And, let’s admit it, for all his diversity, is there maybe something that I actually admire him and I would like to be it myself?” All of a sudden, easy recipes disappear and one is more and more led to question his own tradition rather than the others. After all, Voltaire made it very clear that there was no real tolerance without this painful rationalization of diversity, without the journey and the overcoming of the hatred of the other which is revealing our own dark side. In mimetic vocabulary, our own scandal. The concept is closely knit to the one of tradition: the more people adhere to a well-defined set of core values, the more they understand those of others. Conversely, the more the adherence stops at the formal aspects, the more a different culture is seen as a danger. The same dynamics makes all empires at the peak of their power develop much more open and tolerant societies than those of smaller nations. Challenge So far, we highlighted the value of one’s tradition and the need to keep constantly an eye on ourselves while evaluating other cultures and traditions. Now, how to make sure that the relationship that establishes between the parties is a fruitful one? I suspect that far too often the calls to “dialogue” actually hide a “double monologue”, and the frank confrontation of ideas and visions is avoided somehow out of fear of conflict. But this is a losing position, as mimetic theory tells us that resentment will continue to build up and eventually burst into worse forms. I believe it is more useful to adopt an open challenge approach, where challenge here is meant primarily in its trade meaning. Merchants and
traders (not to mention bankers and financiers!) have never been the darlings of priests and philosophers, often accused (and not without merit) to put money and business in front of everything else. But, as J.P. Dupuy remarked in “Envy and Sacrifice”, markets contain mimetic mechanisms in the double sense of “embedding them” and “manage to limit their risks of escalation”. Indeed, market actors have the privilege of living in a highly mimetic environment, as for example it is vividly represented in “Too Big to Fail”, the journalistic account of the Lehman Brothers crisis of 2008. The book is indeed full of mimetic behaviors and keywords (e.g. resentment, reputation, contagion, panic keep recurring throughout the text) as well as apparent examples of corporate scapegoating like the sacrificial firing of Lehman Brothers no.2 executive Joe Gregory to buy Lehman some breathing space at the beginning of the crisis or the voluntary humiliation that Secretary of Treasury Hank Paulson self-inflicted himself by kneeling in front of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and all Congressmen to save the TARP deal and the world economy in the middle of Congressional panic. All is then bad and these people are irremediably lost to their mimetic hypnosis that brings us from an asset bubble to another? As a sales person aware of mimetic theory, I would like to instead say something definitely in praise of the “market approach” applied to intercultural relationship, to some extent trying to develop on the key remarks of Rene Girard, seen of course from an “insider perspective”. No matter the cultural background, marketers tend to develop remarkable mimetic qualities if they want to survive and thrive in their environment: First, strong sense of the counterparty and how it might behave or react, be it a customer or a competitor. You are not a good market and sales person if you do not keep asking yourself and tune your action to what customers and competitors want and how they might react. It’s a constant exercise of putting oneself in someone else’s shoes. Second, they see the competitor as a “iustus hostis”, exactly in the sense that Carl Schmitt highlighted in his works about the origins of international law. Competition is tough, as they want to steal your customers and sales away from you. At the same time, without them you would not be able to properly articulate your own proposition so there would be no market. And as much as markets can be very hard at times, I have never met a real salesman that would be willing to trade the market game with a quiet life. Third, traders know that competing is a game where you have to continuously imitate and differentiate, with successful models constantly swapping roles with the imitating rivals. Launch a new product, win a market one day and the day after your competitors will be copying you with some slight differences you will careful pay attention to, because one of them could be the next great idea that you might have to copy (with a slight change, of course) the year after. And eventually, traders know that challenge never stops and that after all the ups and the unavoidable downs it makes for an ever better marketplace. A prominent Stanford graduate like Peter Thiel openly acknowledged the value mimetic theory brought to his job of starting up companies where loosely defined roles can lead to conflicts. We just recall that one of those startups is Facebook. Mutually, can we adopt market attitudes into tackling cultural issues involving cultures, values and religion? After all, a strong trade culture is present since time immemorial on both sides of the Mediterranean. The expression of “supermarket of religion” or, to that matter, “supermarket of cultures” has been around for a while and I have always found it evoked in a somehow negative meaning, as to underline the complete “commodification” of culture, the last stage of the capitalist evolution in the Marxist view. However, markets in the Mediterranean have existed long before the birth of capitalism, and mimetic laws governing them date back even further to the origins of culture, at least according to Mimetic theory. I would therefore put it in a more positive perspective, recasting the market as the place where originally goods are proposed for sale by traders to their potential buyers in the midst of competition by other traders. So the first point is, be proud of your goods (be them philosophies, morals or religion) and try to sell them in the right way. Second, watch out for competition, study them carefully and be prepared to compete in a fair way, by means of mutual challenge. As you cannot escape the mimetic mechanism, all the better to embrace it and play by its rules. On a personal basis, I can report that the amount of respect you get (and you in turn grant) from people belonging to different cultures is proportional to how openly you play your identity, be it the one of a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew or an outright Atheist born in any of these environments. And this respect only grows when you openly and frankly engage in mutual cultural challenge, with for example, yourself providing background of why we in the West strongly believe in State and Religion separation and your friend in the East pointing out to the countless text contradictions in the Bible that would be solved by the Quranic reading. People would not generally change ideas or religion, but for sure mutual understanding increases, following exactly the same dynamics by which in healthy markets you tend to grow a respect of your competitors (and you might occasionally go working for them if the right conditions arise!).
Conclusion - In praise of the merchant spirit
I am persuaded that, despite all the bloodshed and violence that the Mediterranean has witnessed, impure and mundane trading is indeed one of the key forces that kept the relationships alive and allowed rival civilizations to continue influencing each other in a positive way. I like to think that Jesus was also referring to this dynamics when He said “Tax collectors and prostitutes will precede you in the Kingdom of Heaven”. Tax officers had a reputation between fellow Jews no better than the one of a Wall Street banker today. Yet, unlike Pharisees who kept hiding from themselves the truth of being prosecutors with their supposed purity, the tax collectors’ connection and engagement with the Roman counterpart put them at an advantage in understanding the mimetic game. And guess what? For a long period of his life, Miguel de Cervantes served as a tax collector for the fleet of the Spanish monarchy. As Rene Girard himself declared that there cannot be an external point of view of mutual imitation as we are all constantly part of it, for the good or the worse, we better learn from the rules used by the impure and despised and try to build our way to Heaven rather than try to be purest and quickly pave our way to Hell.
Bibliography
Rene’ Girard “La voix meconnue du reel” Grasset 2002 (Adelphi it.tr.)
Andrew Ross Sorkin “Too Big to Fail” Viking 2009
Orhan Pamuk “My name is Red” (It.tr. Einaudi 2001)
Orhan Pamuk “The White Castle”(It.tr. Einaudi 2005)
Miguel de Cervantes “Don Quijote” (It. tr. BUR 2009)
Louis de Wohl “The Last Crusader” (It.tr. BUR 2003)
Rajaa Al Sanea “Girls of Riyadh” Penguin Books 2008
Steve Coll “The Bin Ladens” Penguin Books 2009
Miguel de Unamuno “Abel Sanchez” Alianza Editorial 2004
Interview with Peter Thiel “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esk7W9Jowtc”
J.P. Dupuy “Sacrifice and Envy – Liberalism and Social Justice” (It.tr. ECIG 1997)
Wu Ming “Altai” Einaudi 2010
Carl Schmitt “The nomos of the Earth” (It.tr. Adelphi 1991)
Carl Schmitt “Theory of the Partisan” (It.tr. Adelphi 2005)
Acknowledgments
To Sherif, Hikmat, Othman, Mahmoud, Amjad, Idrees, Nazmiye, Emine, Ersin, Canberk, Sevket, Engin, Muniba, Shady, Sameh, Nagui, Rima, Dorsaf, Issam, Turki, the many Mohameds and all the others that placed the roots of this paper in a living relationship and not only in just yet another theory. To Enrico, that first mentioned to me “I see Satan falling like the Lightning” and effectively got me started on Mimetic theory. To my father, that long before he passed away he had already collected many Girard books in his library for me to continue on his readings. And most important, to my wife Alessandra and my kids, that had the patience of bearing with me as I spent many hours of my free time to put together this account.
About the Author
Luca Luchesini graduated in Telecom Networks Engineering from Politecnico di Milano in 1994 and has been working in multinational companies ever since. He started self-learning Mimetic theory in 2007 by reading all major works of Rene Girard. This paper has been published for the first time at the COV&R Girardian conference of 2011 in Salina, Italy. He can be reached at
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