“mirror neurons” don’t mean a girardian revolution

James Alison has a new transcript from a talk posted on his website. Nope. No show tunes this time.

“What I do want to do this evening is to begin to show how this discovery [of Mirror Neurons] feeds into something which I have been attempting to clarify, as a theologian, for some time: namely, that in passages like the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus was not teaching something called “morals”. He was making available an anthropology of desire, and one that presupposes an understanding of who we are, how our selves are constituted, which seems to have a great deal in common with what we are now learning from the scientists.”

The best part of Love Your Enemy: Within a Divided Self is the way Alison has answered one of the hardest questions put to any theist: why does God allow good people to suffer? Until reading this, I was settling for the old answer that it’s all because God allows free will, so, like a reality television show, God’s constrained from interfering in “real life.” A gameshow run by a sadist.

Alison acknowledges that God seems detached from judgments, sending “the sun to rise on the evil and on the good” and the “rain on the just and on the unjust.” But this indifference, Alison says, isn’t the kind we suppose it is. It’s not that he’s left us on our own until Judgment Day, nor that we’ll get our due in the next life, nor that the best among us will be revealed by their suffering (all the Sunday School answers I remember). God isn’t responding to our morality. God doesn’t react to what we do. God doesn’t react at all.

On the contrary, God is able to be towards each one of us without ever being over-against any one of us. God is in no sort of rivalry at all with any one of us, is not part of the same order of being as us, which is how God can create and move us without displacing us. Whereas we who are on the same level as each other can only move each other by displacing each other.

But there is more. Not only do we need to be free from reacting to hostile contagion (hating our enemies as they hate us), we need to be free from friendly contagion (loving our friends as they love us), since dependence on approval from those we love must also lead to hostility, since affiliating oneself with an in-crowd requires an out-crowd:

But, Jesus says, this being run by the adulatory other, or the excoriating other, which is the same thing, has nothing to do with God. What God’s love looks like is being creatively for the other without being defined over against the other in any way at all. That is what is meant by grace and freedom. It is going to involve breaking through the strong-seeming but ultimately fragile dichotomies of “in group” and “out group”, “pure” and “impure”, “good guys” and “bad guys” which are quite simply the ambivalent functions of our cultural identity, and coming to love other people without any over against at all. Living this out is going to look remarkably like a loss of identity, a certain form of death. And living it out as a human is what it is to be a child of God, and to be perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect.

Learning to act toward our enemies as God would requires an ability to see them and ourselves beyond rivalry. But we can’t really know ourselves in a direct way. We aren’t auto-generated, self-contained Minds simply needing mirrors to reflect us back to ourselves. (Descartes was wrong.) It’s more like we’re each a propensity generating a sense of personhood from the mirrored funhouse of social relations. Our being, our identity, arrives culturally through interaction with other people. This is pure Girard, but Alison adds his unique flavor to the theory when he calls that sense of “I” a symptom.  

Jesus wants us to receive our being and identity without rivalrous comparison from the One who forgives. And the One who forgives is the One who offers no rivalry, no deception, no lie, no resentment, no retaliation for any of the many acts of violence we have done. The One who acts and doesn’t react. God.

What I’ve been discussing is the second half of Alison’s talk. The first half is about “Mirror Neurons.” I read the paper by Scott R. Garrels posted at Girardian Lectionary, as Alison suggested. Imitation, Mirror Neurons, & Mimetic Desire: Convergent Support for the Work of Rene Girard. I have to say the science is interesting but seems hardly revolutionary.

Mirror Neurons are neurons that fire when an infant either sees an action or performs the same action. The important part of that is how we physically experience what we observe in the same way we physically experience what we do. In other words, the same circuit that fires when a baby does something also fires when she sees someone else do it. I think the more interesting feature of this research will be what it tells us about a Theory of Mind: how we first become aware that other people have minds and intentions like ours.

It seems to me that mimesis is the least controversial feature of Rene Girard’s anthropology of religion. The science already shows, and wouldn’t almost everyone agree, that humans copy other humans? Most would probably agree that we learn our desires also from watching others. Sure, that goes in the face of some of the western world’s Great Ideas, but even if rarified theories haven’t always accounted for mimicking the desires, intentions, and actions of others, Madison Avenue, Day Care Centers, and Hollywood do.

Garrels writes, “Mimetic scholars and imitation researchers agree, therefore, that the social sciences have failed to recognize the primal role that imitation plays in animating and sustaining the human psyche from the beginnings of life…there still remains a suspicious absence among imitation theories concerning the role that reciprocal mimesis has in generating acts of social rivalry, conflict and ultimately violence.” Later he points out that “Yet there are many gaps in mimetic theory, which have yet to be explained in such a way as to garner sufficient scientific support for its claims. For example, the most obvious gap is the question of how the mechanisms of imitation actually function in the human brain and in the interpersonal matrix where it is found. It is in this light that imitation research has much to offer mimetic theory.”

Although Garrels at first seems to limit the scope of his paper to finding physical support for mimesis, he, like Alison, finds something more in the science. He goes on to claim that the research and the theory “demand that we take seriously” that our imitative nature is “the primary condition form which rivalry and violence emerge in human relations and society at large.” And “Empirical research provided by disciplines such as developmental psychology and neuroscience is in a position to help establish Girard’s theory of psychological mimesis and its broader implications in a similar way that Darwinian theory achieved its substantive structure and continued influence.” (emphasis is mine)

I don’t think that Mirror Neurons are a means of confirming anything more than our greater capacity for mimesis than other animals. Even Girard writes that neurologists believe “the human brain is an enormous imitating machine.” So, I don’t think it’s the mimesis or lack of science behind mimesis that has Girard’s theory languishing in academic circles. It’s those “broader implications” wherein mimetic desire leads to mimetic rivalry and escalates into mimetic violence, murder, resolution, and the founding of culture.

Girard himself has said how commonsense his theory of mimesis is, how 75% of it can be found in the writings of St. Augustine of Hippo. It seems to me the most we can say about Mirror Neurons is that they are confirmation of our common sense understanding. I may believe the following, but I don’t think the science supports it:

a baby is able to distinguish between an adult doing something (for instance, putting a rubber ring on a stick) and an adult failing to get the rubber ring on the stick, so that the baby is able to get right what the adult got “wrong”. This means that it is not merely adult activity which is being imitated, but adult intention. And so it is that we learn to desire according to the desire of the other in the phrase which is at the root of everything which my own principal teacher, René Girard has taught. And thus it is that we as humans no longer have simple instincts, for food, for sex, for safety. Rather, our very way of being in contact with our instincts is received by us through a pattern of desire which is interiorised within us through our imitation of what is prior to, and other than, the self of each one of us.

Ironically, Alison’s analysis strikes me as rather Kantian, except this Categorical Imperative is a duty to love without regard to real-world contingencies (and love looks a lot like forgiveness). The irony is that Kant, as an Enlightenment thinker, linked morality to reason, which was a thing a priori. Nevertheless, he said we should act with reference to every rational being as an end in himself, and not a means to some other end. Is that not what the Sermon on the Mount is all about?