René Girard, J. D. Vance, and You
It's showing up a lot on the right, but mimetic theory doesn't play well with authoritarian politics of any stripe.
In my last post discussing the idea of “sin” in Tanararive Due’s novel, The Reformatory, I veered into a few obscure theological and anthropological ideas related to “mimetic theory,” a body of thought developed over the last half century by French-American scholar René Girard.
Or, as one of my readers called it, “That thing J. D. Vance really likes, right?”
I was only vaguely aware that Vance had apparently name-dropped Girard and mimetic theory in one of his speeches (I’ve been trying to stay off “Big Internet” this month). I was even less aware that he wrote about mimetic theory’s influence on his spiritual and political trajectory back in 2020. I was aware, though, that glowing mentions of Girard and mimetic theory had started popping up across the far right side of the political spectrum since at least the pandemic—especially via billionaire tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who studied under Girard at Stanford. It was because of Girard’s work that Thiel first invested in Facebook; the technology seemed to recognize that imitation was at the heart of human relationships. But where his mentor would have seen Facebook as an Icarus complex designed to absorb everyone into itself, Thiel sees a way to bring human imitation and desire under more… “appropriate” controls. J. D. Vance appears to be part of this project.
I’ve been listening for snatches of this discourse with a kind of curious trepidation. As Jacob Silverman writes over at Zeteo, “Because of Thiel’s name hovering near him, Girard has come to be seen as a right-wing thinker – to the dismay of his many liberal and leftist devotees.” With some caveats, I am one of those latter; I have good friends who are the latter, and I also work for an organization that’s been inspired by mimetic theory towards peaceful, non-partisan, and what many would call “progressive” ends. “Dismay” is a good word for what I feel when I hear Girard’s name invoked alongside Thiel’s call for a “new nihilism,” or Vance’s seemingly opportunistic drift towards authoritarianism.
This Fall,
and I will run a program with very basic mimetic insights as its foundation. Girard shows up in both our bodies of work, and we’re insistent that mimetic theory is an essential tool for peace, politics, and religion going forward. Given the present discourse, I think it’s becoming urgent that we start clarifying what we do and don’t mean by that.The basic points of mimetic theory are readily available here on Substack and elsewhere;
especially has had a profound influence on this site, and many folks here are influenced by mimetic theory thank to him. The question I’m most concerned with is whether mimetic theory is a tool for positive peace in our time, or else just the first trumpet of the apocalypse as some seem to think.In this post, I’m going to give a quick rundown of what I think folks like Thiel and Vance see in mimetic theory, and why I think theirs is an ultimately simplistic take on a very complex body of work that has inspired many others around the world to strive nonviolently for peace and justice.
Each of these points is going to deserve a clarifying essay of its own, but we can cross that bridge when we come to it.
1. Mimetic theory shows that critiques of identity politics and cancel culture can have a point
One of the most difficult things to swallow about mimetic theory is that it applies to everyone. No one is immune from the pulls of imitation and rivalry–and this includes the marginalized and the oppressed. Girard is very critical of both the French and Russian revolutions, noting that in both cases an oppressed class that came to power immediately solidified their new governments by imitating the most excessive political violence of their former oppressors.
This does not mean Girard is against the causes of social justice; in fact, he claims that (at least historically) Christianity so foregrounded the victim in the modern consciousness that we can no longer eradicate our victims with full impunity in the ways archaic societies once did. There will always be a “gap” into which the cause of the oppressed speaks with full force. What Girard wants to watch in this “gap” is the tendency for mere justification to wear the mask of true justice.
There is, in this idea, a valid critique of “cancel culture” and what James Alison calls “marginaholism.” It’s a warning about how one can turn their vulnerable status into a grab for power. Those who critique identity politics aren’t wrong to notice this.
The problem is that the very critique has become a new form of identity politics. It is now those afraid of cancel culture who claim to be victims of it, who claim that CRT and “gender ideology” push straight white men into a marginal or “victim” position. One of the most profound insights of mimetic theory is that the scapegoat is always innocent of the crimes society lays on them; in the modern mind, only the victim sees the truth of things, and so they have authority. It is politically useful to be in the victim position, while denying that same authority to others.
2. Mimetic theory can be kind of lukewarm on democracy
Another controversial element in Girard’s ouvre is his careful, critical appraisal of liberal democracy as an ultimate good. Modern liberal democracy, Girard says, arises from the convergence of capitalism, secularism, and globalization—each of which comes at its own costs. The sum total of these developments is a society of people who all presume their relative equality with one another and who also have no patience for any restrictions on their desires or self-expressions.1 The proximity of all these people to one another is a crisis waiting to happen.
Note that Girard isn’t claiming people are unequal; rather he is observing that striated societies have built-in controls over their own violence. In a monarchy, for example, one may agree or disagree with the king, but no one imagines themselves becoming king; no one looks at the position of king, or even noble, and thinks, “Well, I’ve got all the right stuff they do, so why not me?” Historically, inequality has been a pragmatic measure that downplays rivalry and thus preserves peace. But it comes at the substantial cost of human dignity, a cost Girard readily acknowledges and critiques.
If there is a perceived choice, however, between individual dignity and freedom and greater social stability, a Thiel or a Vance seems inclined to choose the latter. And if hierarchy and lopsided dominion secure even tenuous peace, then so be it. (Though the cost of this stability will of course be paid for unequally, too.)
When you put Girard’s theories of human imitation in the hands of someone who believes that some people are superior by virtue of their intelligence or moral fiber, you get a very intellectually grounded way of identifying “lesser minds” whose desires can be easily manipulated. And because people lower in that hierarchy don’t know what to desire, they ultimately need to be controlled. “The good” needs to be rigorously pushed in front of such people by their superiors, so that they might learn, via mimesis, what’s really worth desiring.
But if the alternative is people’s desires going out of control and escalating to violence and scapegoating, well… The vision becomes, perhaps, a shade less spiteful.
3. Mimetic theory can be recruited into a narrative of Christian triumphalism
For Christians involved in culture and politics, nothing beats a good conversion story. I should know; I love them, too. C. S. Lewis is a fan favorite, but more contemporary examples include Antony Flew or Francis Collins.2 We religious types feel vindicated by stories of intellectuals who find that there really is something to this whole “faith” thing after all; there may be bonus points if they decide their former adherence to progressive politics was as vacuous as their atheism.
Girard loosely fits this narrative. Previously an atheist, he later believed that Judaism (and ultimately Christianity) revealed something categorically different from the sacrificial logics of archaic religion. He was so enthralled by the picture of a God who identified with the victims of violence that he couldn’t explain the Judeo-Christian tradition as anything other than an act of genuine divine revelation working itself out over centuries. Christianity, he believed, offered humanity the definitive way out of the cycles of mimesis and violence: the imitation of a God whose very nature was perpetual self-giving.
Several scholars have pushed back on Girard and argued that these insights into the “priority of the victim” appear in other religions as well.3 Girard himself received these insights as a committed Christian, but not a triumphalist. Yet in the thought of Thiel and Vance, Girard’s Christianity—his Catholicism specifically—is part and parcel of a larger justification for Western superiority and a hierarchically ordered society.
As Thiel himself has said, he prefers the “Christianity of Constantine” to that of “Mother Theresa.” There’s an unmistakable drift here towards what Girard himself would say is the worst possible outcome: a hollowing out of Christianity’s core message of divine solidarity with the victims of violence, plunging its subversive symbols and saving power back into the sacrificial cauldron of archaic religion.
A Theory of Violence; A Path to Peace
Ultimately, I think mimetic theory appeals to political extremism of all types through its rather low anthropology—at least, on the face of it. As Girard describes how deeply disposed to violence we are, it’s easy to conclude that human beings are simply stuck, that we cannot change. It’s a theory ripe for abuse by the politically pessimistic, who believe that these sorts of insights are ultimately about other people: they are enslaved to imitation, not me. They are derivative while I am unique; they are imitators while I am an innovator; they are sheeple while I am an overman; they want violence while I want peace; their violence is malicious while mine is just, and my violence must push out their violence for the good of all.
But this pessimism forgets that Girard was first influenced by literature, by stories of people who do change. The novelist Marcel Proust, for example, has what Girard considers one of the greatest “conversion stories” of all time. Though Proust does not become religious, he has such a profoundly gratuitous experience of everyday life that it transforms and liberates him from his desire to be a great writer. By the time he finishes the final volume of his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, the novelist is able to take a clear-eyed, non-resentful look at himself and who he used to be. There is a clear demarcation between Proust’s “locust years,” flitted away in anxiety and resentment, and the mature writer who receives catharsis from that resentment not through violence but through a kind of grace. According to Girard, those who open up to the futility of their striving can—in truly miraculous ways—change.4
This was how mimetic theory changed me. It helped me understand myself and my own emotions. I suddenly saw why I kept getting serially fixated on other graduate students, quantifying my successes against theirs. I had an explanation for why my anxieties tended to “cycle,” finding the same objects to land on over and over again. I was Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. I was, as Kierkegaard puts it, longing to be anyone other than myself—which the great theologian James Cone says is the “depth of despair.” In confronting me with these depths, Girard in many ways taught me how to pray, and to seek solidarity with others.
And it wasn’t just me; mimetic theory put glasses on everything. It was an account of the mechanisms behind human evil, without which history feels unintelligible. Someone like Willie James Jennings could point me to the failed social imagination of Christianity that led to centuries of institutionalized racism, but he couldn’t tell me why people made such a vicious error in the first place. Girard didn’t tell me why, either, but he taught me how: there are deep-rooted patterns that predispose people towards victimizing and sacrificing those with whom they feel uncomfortable kinship. Patterns “hidden since the foundations of the world” — but not, ultimately, essential to who we are.
“If the mechanism can be seen to be illusion-making,” Sebastian Moore writes of mimesis and violence, “it cannot be ‘of our nature.’ A mistake cannot be of the essence. The essence is that about which the mistake is made.” It’s precisely this sort of conversion and recognition that’s missing from Thiel’s and Vance’s stories, and so makes me doubt that they’ve gone below mimetic theory’s surface into its deepest insights:
We are more than these patterns. They are not inevitable.
They can change.
Keep that in mind this election cycle. I’m sure this isn’t the last time we’ll be exploring these questions together.
Worthy of note: while Girard argues that a society in some sense needs prohibitions and restrictions around desire, this by no means implies that these prohibitions ought to come top-down from the state. Michel Foucault, for example, developed a rigorous “technique” of the self which recognized self-constraint as inherently valuable and creative. One apocryphal quotation has him saying, “If I weren’t a total atheist, I would be a monk, and a very good one.” Part of the Christian cultural heritage—secularized and not—is the idea that human beings are capable of recognizing for themselves that constraints on their desires are often very good things. This deserves further exploration, too.
Flew did not, of course, actually convert to Christianity, but it just goes to show that the narrative of “reasonable faith” gobbling up highly intelligent atheists like so many Pokémon is a very powerful and exciting one.
See Girard, “Literature and Christianity: A Personal View” in All Desire is Desire for Being, ed. Cynthia Haven (Penguin 2023), pp.259-72.
Yeah, I recently listened to Thiel talking about Girard on Tyler Cowan's podcast. Having read several books by Girard years ago, it seemed like he took almost the opposite conclusions from him that I had. In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard's conclusion (as I recall) is that Jesus broke the machine of justifying violence to control violence. The only options left for the world now are self-destruction or forgiveness. How you get from that to Thiel's politics is baffling.
Very insightful with well explained nuances of this theory, which is new to me. I do grow tired of insisting that our choices (in politics, religion, etc) should be based on what is right or equal to all instead of what’s easy or comfortable. We don’t allow time for adjustment and appropriate solutions. Example: a societal shift to more women in the workforce, creating childcare and family breakdowns in some cases, should necessitate our advice for women to just stay home and have more babies.