Reading René Girard’s careful, scholarly writing, you wouldn’t bet on him inspiring Silicon Valley. The rather old-fashioned literary scholar focussed on “great books” — Proust, Shakespeare, Greek tragedy, the Bible — and eschewed deconstruction and other postmodern trends.
And yet US Vice President JD Vance ascribes his adult conversion to Catholicism partly to the influence of Girard, via his campaign funder, the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. The latter encountered Girard at Stanford and champions him to aspiring entrepreneurs. Now, 10 years after his death, Girard is everywhere — profiled in the Financial Times, analysed on politics podcasts, presented in YouTube lecture series by men in tailored suits.
Would Girard be happy about this? Given his warnings about scapegoating, it’s hard to imagine him celebrating his influence upon a vice president who campaigned by accusing immigrants of eating pets. And he’d probably be greatly puzzled by the promotion of his ideas as a key to business success. What strikes me is how the popular versions of Girard leave out his most powerful idea — the one most humbling to our pride. He has been popularised as a propounder of “grand, gruesome theories” about the secret savagery behind civilisation. But I see him, before this, as a theorist of identity. This element in his thought seems to have been played down by his new, high-status audience.
Girard’s name for his body of thought is “Mimetic Theory”. It is founded on a single idea: mimetic desire. This is the hypothesis that our desires, beyond our basic needs, are always mediated by a mimetic model: somebody who guides us on what to desire, and what not to. Everyone knows that online shoppers look to influencers to decide which brands to buy. But Girard shows the same dynamic at work in the sophisticated plots of great theatre and novels, not to mention the Bible. Somehow, through some unexpected twists, this hypothesis leads Girard to a theory of human culture and violence.
Some find Mimetic Theory to be a revelation, explaining everything from social media to the US-China trade war. Others are dubious. But both sides overlook a fundamental philosophical question. Why would our desires be mediated by a model? Why should we need somebody else to show us what to want?
Girard gave a direct answer to this question, one that has been largely ignored. Once we have solved the problem of satisfying our basic needs, we begin to wonder about who we are. Anyone can look back at their awkward teenage years to remind themselves of the terrible challenge of deciding who to be — sharing in Saint Augustine’s feeling: “I have become an enigma to myself.” Popular culture, with its roots reaching back to Romantic literature, bombards us with the idea that your true identity is already buried deep inside you. All you need to do is find it and draw it out. Girard’s confronting idea is that this is a lie — he calls it the “Romantic lie”. In reality, there is no true you hidden deep inside. Inside you there is only emptiness. Answers to the question of who you are can only come from outside, from the example set by others. This is why we need a model to mediate our desires and, more generally, to tell us what to be.
Girard reported that the first philosophical book he understood was Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Perhaps he took the idea of our inner emptiness from Sartre, who wrote that “man is nothing other than what he makes of himself”. Sartre believed that, lacking innate identity, we could invent ourselves in a heroic act of radical creativity. Girard found this incomprehensible. How can we invent ourselves, including even the desires that motivate us, without some model to follow? If we have no innate identity, we have no choice but to model ourselves on others.
His most profound and disturbing thought is that we copy not just our desires but our whole identity from others. His preferred term for identity was “being”, as it was for Sartre. Thus, he said: “absolute being — I don’t have in me. I don’t feel it. I feel my emptiness. But the other always seems to have more of it than I have.” As far as I’ve seen, this idea has not made it to Silicon Valley, nor the podcasts, nor YouTube, nor the White House.
“How can we invent ourselves, including even the desires that motivate us, without some model to follow?”
Consider Thiel. He draws heavily on Mimetic Theory in a self-help book modestly subtitled: “How to Build the Future”. He is clearly influenced by Girard’s explanation of how mimetic desire escalates into rivalry. Suppose my boss is my mimetic model. I start to dress like her, talk like her, aim at rising to her position, etc. She begins to feel threatened and takes measures to ward me off as a rival. But this makes her position seem even more exclusive and alluring. I emulate her more ardently, intensifying her feelings of rivalry, and so on in an upward spiral. Thiel uses this self-reinforcing dynamic between mimesis and rivalry to argue that competition, via mimesis, has a homogenising effect. The more competitive the marketplace, the more firms end up copying each other and producing indistinguishable products. The more competitive academia gets, the more everyone writes different versions of the same paper, over and over again.
So far, so Girardian (and, regarding academia, unfortunately true). But what is Thiel’s solution? The true innovator, he suggests, must rise above mimetic competition and do what nobody else is doing. That isn’t Girard; it’s Sartre. Girard found no sense in the idea of radical, unmodelled creation. He would ask: where are we meant to get the idea for what nobody else is doing? Clearly not from others. But not from inside ourselves either. Inside is only emptiness. This humbling thought has been quietly dropped from Thiel’s entrepreneurial version of Girardianism.
The same is true of Thiel’s political use of Girard. This appears most clearly in a paper, “The Straussian Moment”, which Thiel gave at a conference in 2004, on “Politics & Apocalypse”. He personally funded this conference and invited Girard, whose contribution was a modest philological study of some violent language in the Gospels. Thiel, meanwhile, unveiled a grand apocalyptic vision of the world after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. He presented these attacks as a wakeup call to the liberal West, which had grown complacent about violence. He ended with advice to “the Christian statesman or stateswoman”, who “would be wise, in every close case, to side with peace”. A not-so-subtle implication is that, in cases that aren’t “close”, the wise Christian should, as Hobbes put it, seek all the helps and advantages of war.
Although he cites Girard, Thiel seems to forget his thesis that conflict is bound up with mimesis. As others have noted, Thiel seems to envisage a “clash of civilisations” between ideologically differentiated enemies — the Christian West and fundamentalist Islam — rather than, as Mimetic Theory would find, mimetic rivals whose conflict stems from wanting the same things, who become more alike the more they fight.
Again, the most important missing idea here is that of emptiness and identity. For Girard, political organisations, like individuals, don’t come with pre-packaged innate identities. They too have to decide what to be and have nothing to guide them but the examples set by others. At the national or personal level, the dogged pursuit of identity will only lead to rivalry and conflict.
Girard holds that we can’t switch off our longing for identity. But, instead of the heroic self-creation promoted by Thiel, he proposes that we satisfy our craving with a very different sort of model: the model of Jesus. For Girard, Jesus represents not a specific identity but rather the idea of God expressed in every identity. This is the core of Girard’s Christianity, as I see it. His final book discusses Pope John Paul II’s reflections on “an identity of all people”. This “divine” identity is reached when we detach ourselves from any fixed notion of self and open up to continuously being radically transformed in our encounters with others.
The same message was given by another Pope to that other powerful but wayward Girardian, JD Vance. To justify his aggressive nationalism, Vance pointed to the Catholic teaching of ordo amoris. The late Pope Francis then wrote a letter on this subject to the bishops of the United States of America, asserting that “it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity”.
Concerning identity, the politicians and business leaders garble Girard’s message. It calls for a fluid, open, and welcoming identity, not one that seeks protection from the influence of others. The Popes get much closer to this meaning. Girard would probably be happy with that.
***
Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self by Alexander Douglas is published by Allen Lane on 19th June.
