Is violence endemic to us?

Since the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT, there has been much media, social, political, and religious attention focused on gun control.  I can’t count the number of voices calling for stricter regulations and tighter controls. There are at least an equal number who want to maintain the status quo. The rhetoric has been deafening.

What strikes me as odd is that we didn’t have similarly boisterous outcries following Columbine, Gabrielle Giffords, or the Aurora Theatre shootings. Perhaps that’s because there were so many children who were innocent victims.  I suppose the reasons are unimportant, but I think the conversation is very important.  I’m afraid the conversation won’t be addressing the real problem.  I think Porky Pine, speaking to Pogo Possum captured it perfectly:

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

French Literature professor and literary critic René Girard made a profound discovery.  While looking for what made a truly great novel, he observed that conflict relationships always seemed to include a third-party. This most often is an object, a thing, and it is the source of the conflict.  He suggests that all of our desires, what we want, are derived from someone else.  We “borrow” them.  He called this “mimetic desire”.  Mimesis, from which the word ‘mime’ is derived, is imitation, mimicry, or representation.  This leads to mimetic rivalry: one party has something (Girard calls it the ‘mediator’) that the other desires.  It manifests itself in many ways. Perhaps the easiest to see is ‘the desire to have what someone else has.’  Advertising seems to be oriented toward convincing us that we really want to possess the newest product.

From here, it is a short jump to violence as a method of acquiring the mediator.  If you think about novels you’ve read, you can probably already identify some examples of this.

The last concept he identified is the ‘scapegoat mechanism’. This, he holds, as foundational to sacrifice and human culture itself. He sees religion as the development of a mechanism to combat mimetic rivalry.

A few examples from the Bible:

• Cain kills Abel because God preferred Abel’s offering over that of Cain.
• Jacob tricks Isaac into giving him Esau’s birthright. Rachel helped out in this one, so we have conspiracy.
• Joseph is cast into a pit by his brothers because he is Jacob’s favorite son.
•  The Apostles blame the Jews for Jesus’ crucifixion (Acts). This one is complicated: Mimetic rivalry is behind Jesus’ trial; the Apostles are scapegoating the Jews; in a theological view, Jesus is the scapegoat for humanity.

There are many, many more examples throughout the Bible.

With Girard's perspective in view, it would seem like violence is endemic to the human race. I think the question that remains is: Is there anything we can do to change this? I don't like being a pessimist, but I'm not hopeful. My lack of hope stems from a sense that we, as humans, don't spend a lot of time thinking on our motivations for the things we do. I'll not suggest that we give over too much to the reptilian brain we each possess, but it does seem like it at times. I know when I find myself getting angry, one of the last thoughts is "Why am I getting angry?" It probably ought to be one of the first thoughts. Maybe the first thought should be, "Is this how God would want me to behave?" Something about the second of the Great Commandments comes to mind.

What it’s really all about is our failure to live into the Kingdom of God, to live into our full stature as Children of God.  We keep forgetting or ignoring Jesus’ commandment to us: “Love one another as I have loved you.” It’s only what God has been after us to do since the beginning.  I wonder why it is that we can’t seem to do it.