Stop Copying Me! (why nothing is original)

Things Hidden and Revealed, Part 1

What makes humans human

Imagine you are lost in the jungle. You’ve been walking for days without seeing another human soul— until today. You catch a glimpse of someone through the thick vegetation and call out, “Hey! Do you know where we are?” 

He comes crashing through the trees with relief and anticipation on his face. He too appears lost and glad to see another human. But you soon realize he understands not a word you have said. And as vocalizations spill out of his mouth, they mean nothing to you; it’s like no language you’ve ever heard. You try a few phrases in Spanish, but it is clear he does not speak that language either, as he only continues to speak words and use gestures you can’t understand. 

You give up and offer him one of the bananas you picked earlier. He offers you some dried jerky in return. You sit together in silence for a bit, relaxed and comforted by the presence of one another. 

Suddenly, an eerie silence falls over the jungle. The birds stop their chattering and the insects stop buzzing. The hairs on the back of your neck stand on end, and in the distance, from beyond a stand of coconut trees, you hear something making its way through the forest. You brace yourself in alarm and look toward your new friend, but he remains relaxed and unconcerned. You realize he doesn’t know what you know.

Yesterday, you experienced the same phenomenon: the stilling of all sound save for a faint footfall that grew louder and louder as it came toward you. Perhaps, you had thought, it was someone from a search party sent to rescue you. Unfortunately, it was not. It was instead a terrifying jaguar on the hunt. You barely escaped with your life. 

You are eager not to repeat that close call, and would like to save your new friend the trouble of having to learn about it first-hand. “JAGUAR!” you shout in alarm. “We have to go!” You gesture emphatically, repeatedly pointing in the opposite direction of the coconut trees. 

He continues to stare at you, uncomprehending. You try a few more gestures without success. Finally, you mime running, while continuing to point in the direction you mean to go. The panther’s footsteps are growing louder. Your friend sits up in alarm, finally grasping your meaning. Together, you run. 

This ability to copy one another’ movements is the foundation of all communication. It is not unique to humans— most animals practice some form of mimicry. But it can only communicate what is happening in the present moment. By miming a running motion, you were able to communicate the need to run…NOW. But you could say nothing of what you experienced yesterday, much less where you were when you got lost several days ago, or where it is you are hoping to ultimately arrive.

To communicate information about the past and the future you must build up a repertoire of these movements— gestures, vocalizations, and facial expressions— by mimicking one another back and forth until you begin to establish increasingly complex patterns of shared meaning. This ability to mimic gestures and innovate new ones with conscious intent is the foundation of language. 

Our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees, have a rudimentary language. They can communicate information and even emotions using complex gestures. They also have memories of the past and can anticipate the future. But crucially, they cannot communicate those memories and anticipations to other chimpanzees. Only humans can do that. Only we can tell stories with a narrative flow that progresses from past to present to future. Only we can preserve memories through these stories, building a complex system of shared practices and meaning that in time becomes culture. This is what’s known as mimesis, and it’s made humans the most social and cooperative species on earth.

Why we want what others want

Rene Girard was born in the old Provençal town of Avignon on the river Rhône. It is sometimes said Avignon means “place of violent winds” for the gusts that blow through the town. Like his father, Girard studied history. He didn’t want to follow his father’s path, however, by settling down in Avingnon and becoming an archivist. After World War II, he set out for America to obtain his PhD, eventually taking the only job that would allow him to remain there: teaching literature.

It was while reading the great novels of the last few hundred years that his historian’s mind began to notice repeated patterns of behavior. Out of his literary analysis he would construct a theory of mimetic behavior, violence, and religion that incorporated anthropology, psychology, and theology.

His work has long been studied by theorists of peacemaking and nonviolence but has remained relatively unknown to the general public until recently. While his work has been championed by his former student, Silicon Valley billionaire and Trump supporter Peter Thiel for the past decade or so (an association that leads some people to erroneously label him a right-wing theorist), the key to renewed interest in his work seems to be the fact that he uniquely makes sense of the polarization, groupthink, and canceling phenomena we are experiencing right now, particularly in online spaces. The last year or so has brought us a book distilling his ideas into a sort of self-help philosophy (Wanting, by Luke Burgis), and one of his key concepts was name-checked by (and obviously informed the plotline for) a character in HBO’s White Lotus. 

Mimetic theory states that not only has mimesis made us profoundly cooperative, it’s also made us profoundly violent. It’s no accident that Girard was studying literature when he developed it. As we have seen, mimesis and narrative are deeply entwined. He notices that the conflicts presented in the novels he’s reading all seem to hinge around this mimetic principle. In all cases, the protagonist desires something, which sets up the narrative arc. But he always desires something because another person desires it first. 

In the case of Don Quixote, it’s a mythical knight, Amadis, who serves as a role model. Amadis has great adventures and accomplishes great deeds, all for the love of a fair lady, and so Quixote goes off in pursuit of his own quest. In Emma Bovary, Emma’s models are the heroines she reads about in novels. In both cases, they only want the things they want because they first see somebody else wanting them. 

Wanting something because someone else wants it first is what Girard calls “mimetic desire.” He says desire is “triangular” in that it is always mediated by another, a model whom we are mimicking, creating a three-way configuration between us, the model, and the object of desire. The model doesn’t need to be imaginary like Quixote’s knight or Emma Bovary’s heroines. Think about the celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow or the Kardashians who have built huge businesses around recommending products to their fans. Khloe is seen using a $25 water bottle from Amazon, and days later, it sells out. There’s nothing particularly special about it (it has pretty colors and motivational slogans), but it becomes desirable because she has made it so.

That’s it. That’s the water bottle

In all these cases, the models that are inducing us to desire are what Girard calls external mediators, in that they exist outside of our social sphere. I can mimic Gwyneth Paltrow’s understated elegance and clean beauty style, but I’m never going to be her friend or have her wealth. She’s never going to become a true rival. I might resent her for having access to things that I don’t, but to think of somehow competing with her would be ridiculous. She’s so far beyond caring about someone like me that it’s laughable. 

The genesis of the frenemy

In other cases, however, the model is much closer to us. Think about the protagonists of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, Lenu and Lila. They are the best of friends and the two smartest kids growing up in an impoverished suburb of Naples. But that closeness also makes them rivals. Lenu has a more supportive family and is able to obtain an education that takes her places. Lila is more beautiful and wily and uses that to her favor to obtain admirers and material goods. Each believes their friend to be more brilliant and wants what the other has. When your model exists within your social sphere like Lila and Lenu, Girard calls it an internal mediator.

In mimetic theory, it’s the internal mediators that cause the trouble. As long as I am modeling my desire on an external mediator, there’s no real chance of competition. They may serve as a positive inspiration, or they may cause me to feel inadequate and insecure, but either way, we are unlikely to do any real damage to one another. 

If I model my desire on an internal mediator— a close friend, or maybe a workmate who has a lot of similarities with me— then we become what Girard calls mimetic rivals. Lenu and Lilu both compete for the same school prizes. When Lila sees that Lenu is in love with a boy named Nico, she swoops in and steals him. Later, when their paths have diverged, they compete to display a sense of happiness or accomplishment. Each wants to prove that she has chosen the better path.

Girard’s insight is that it is this mimetic rivalry that leads to war. As long as the mediator is truly external, they can serve as a mere model. Don Quixote tries to live a life like Amadis, charging off on a quest and idealizing a woman he calls Dulcinea, but he’s never going to meet him in battle. I can buy Goop products or a colorful water bottle, but I’ll never have Gwyneth or Khloe’s life.

Lenu and Lila, frenemies forever

But when it is someone closer to home, the rivalry is much more likely to cause trouble, in part because mimetic behavior can be reciprocated between the two rivals. I get mad at my best friend and tell her she looks fat in her new jeans, and she screams back that everyone at school is laughing at my new haircut. We trade barbs back and forth until the damage piles up. Maybe we will eventually make up or maybe we will part ways. We probably won’t come to the point of violence, partly because we have laws and a lot of social mores that discourage us from that. (There’s also the fact that men are more likely to be physically violent than women, but we’ll set that aside for now). 

Good fences make good neighbors

Girard says that having social differentiation— like castes and classes— helps to contain violence by channeling desire externally and limiting opportunities for rivalry. This is where his theory starts to upset a lot of people, and makes them assume he’s advocating for elitism. He’s not— he’s simply trying to describe a dynamic that he believes is real, and at the root of a lot of our problems. 

I don’t know if I buy the idea that everything we desire is purely mimetic. I do believe there is such a thing as authentic desire. But even those often exist as nameless yearnings until someone else gives shape to them. In the meantime, we learn to want and chase things because we believe they will fill the ache, even though most of the time they don’t. 

Advertisers have learned so well to play on the mimetic nature of our desires, that it may not be clear that there is a mimetic rival. We’re constantly bombarded with images of things to desire. If I see an ad on the subway for a cool new computer, perhaps Apple and their advertising agency gave me that desire, but how I say there’s a rival?”

Ahh, but then I go to work with my brand new Macbook Pro, and everyone oohs and ahs over the new features, and they know that I always have the latest tech. I’m that guy. They’re my rivals, and I’ve won this round. 

In the past, this kind of rivalry was far more likely to cause violence, and Girard’s point is that a lot of the cultural frameworks and institutions we call civilization were developed to contain it. Archaeological sites that show less evidence of overt violence, like Çatalhöyök in Turkey, tend to show high levels of ritual behavior and social differentiation (though not necessarily stratification, where there are wide gaps in wealth or status). These rituals and social distinctions help to keep people from competing with one another.

Yes, I know this is Thomas Jefferson with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Alexander Hamilton and NOT famous dueling partner (and killer) Aaron Burr, but TJ was by far the best character

Mimesis is at the heart of being human, and it’s at the root of all culture. We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t so exceptionally good at copying one another. But that capability of ours can have disastrous consequences, particularly when resources are limited (or we merely perceive that they are limited). It can also allow destructive and counterproductive ideas to spread through groups of people. Nowhere do we see that illustrated better than the internet, a mimetic machine par excellence. 

This is the first in what will probably be a very long series building what I think will be a sort of evolutionary-historical understanding of Christianity. I’m starting with Girard, but his theories are only one piece of it. 

I’ll get more into ritual and how it contains violence next time when I go into Girard’s theory of how religions develop. But in the meantime, I’ll ask you: Do you see evidence of mimetic desire at work in your life? Do you see desire as a problem or not?

Bibliography

Winkelman, Michael The Supernatural as Natural: A Biocultural Approach to Religion

Boyd, Bryan “The evolution of stories: from mimesis to language, from fact to fiction” in Wiley Interdisciplinary Review of Cognitive Science

Palaver, Wolfgang Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory

Girard, Rene Deceit, Desire, and the Novel

Girard, Rene Violence and the Sacred

Hodder, Ian (ed) Violence and the Sacred in the Ancient Near East: Girardian Conversations at Çatalhöyök

And a shoutout to The Girard Course