I don\u2019t know whether what I am about to write is true. \u00a0But it seems to me, from reading what Girard\u2019s admirers, such as Alberg, have written, Professor Girard saw through the eyes of that parent, and concluded that, in human evolution, the \u201ctearing the world apart\u201d of infantile mimetic rivalry had to be mitigated.\u00a0 In order to survive, groups had to evolve some cultural mechanism for short-circuiting the escalating violence.\u00a0 That mechanism was scapegoating.<\/p>\n
And weirdly, Girard was correct in his diagnosis, because in our realm, the realm of unconstrained complexity (and the realm of all writing, I must add) we are like infants without parents.\u00a0 We do not have immediate experiential access to the \u201cobject that brings us into relation\u201d; that is, \u201cthe object that we compete to sacrifice for\u201d.\u00a0 So we fight \u2013 like those children – over what we imagine that \u201cthing\u201d to be.<\/p>\n
Revelation was necessary.\u00a0 Girard was correct in his conclusion that Christianity (emerging from Judaism and Greek Philosophy) provides a unique antidote to scapegoating because it encourages us to recognize the phenomenon.<\/p>\n
But even more weirdly, Girard never contemplated the possibility that mimetic rivalry could have been adaptive in the Lebenswelt that we evolved in.<\/p>\n
Girard saw through the eyes of the Parent.\u00a0 But now, his insight is bound to pass from the Parent into the Laboratory, because, within the cultural physiology of the scapegoat beats the heart of a once adaptive algorithm, the sacrificial lamb, who dies according to \u201cYour Will, not mine\u201d.<\/p>\n
Perhaps, an even more potent antidote to scapegoating is the very thing that gives it life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I don\u2019t know whether what I am about to write is true. \u00a0But it seems to me, from reading what Girard\u2019s admirers, such as Alberg, have written, Professor Girard saw through the eyes of that parent, and concluded that, in human evolution, the \u201ctearing the world apart\u201d of infantile mimetic rivalry had to be mitigated.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychology-and-the-scapegoat-girard"],"yoast_head":"\n