liberal violence and conservative girardians

Taking off from the work of Emile Durkheim and Rene Girard, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion by Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle deconstructs violence and non-violence, showing them structurally the same. 

Both violence and non-violence accept the rationale of willing sacrifice as the means for a group to self-identify. This is something that needs emphasis for all who seek identity as pacifists, feminists, atheists, or any other liberal-leaning ideology, and I’m one of those. The twentieth century brought gains to disenfranchised classes of society, but the structure we work within has not really changed, has it? So how far can our gains really go?

We can talk about blood sacrifice in terms of sectarian religion, as Girard does most often, or civil religion (nationalism), as the authors do here. Either way, escalating violence can be stopped only when a sacrifice is made. The most important point here is that sacrifice works to stop violence NOT when we have killed, say, ten-thousand enemies, but when ten-thousand of our own group members have given their lives.

What bonds a group is the willing sacrifice of its members, not the unwilling sacrifice made of an enemy. In other words, a member of my group who gives her life (ultimate sacrifice) for my group reinforces to me (as a member of the group) the truth of my world-view. It’s not the “sacrifice” she makes of other people that matters but of herself. And the authors elaborate this point:

To understand how war is ritual sacrifice, recall that the raw material of society is bodies. Organizing and disposing of them is the fundamental task of all societies. The social is quite literally constructed from the body and from specific bodies that are dedicated and used up for the purpose. The enduringness of any group depends at least partly on the willingness of its members to sacrifice themselves for the continuing life of the group. The creation of national or sectarian religious sentiment depends on a common secret, which is that the underlying cost of all society is the violent death of some portion of its members. There is more. Our deepest secret, the collective group taboo, is the knowledge that society depends on the death of this sacrificial group at the hands of the group itself. This is the totem principle concretized.

Why is it necessary to kill our own, and why can’t we admit it? It is necessary, and we cannot admit it because violence poses the greatest threat to the group from within as well as without. It is never eradicated. Like sex, it can only be channeled. When violence begins, it can be prevented from spreading only if someone is willing to submit. Submission is the sacrificial principle. To keep violence from escalating and killing every member of the group, either by invasion from without or contagion within, group members agree to submit to a violent authority who punishes all who do not honor the totem’s exclusive right to kill its own. Even when the enemy kills us, his transgression is not so much that he kills as that he kills us. Only totem authority–the group deity in sectarian terms, the group itself in Durkheimian terms–is so entitled.

For example, we tell ourselves that the purpose of war is to kill the enemy. And it is. But what keeps the group together and makes us feel unified is not the sacrifice of the enemy but the sacrifice of our own. If the ritual purpose of war were merely to kill the enemy, the deaths of some 40,000 or more Iraqis would have made a lasting contribution to American national unity. During the Persian Gulf war, notable for the ephemerality of its unifying effect, only 147 Americans died, a poor totem sacrifice. The two most unifying bloodlettings in American history, the Civil War and World War II, sacrificed the largest number of the nation’s own, both absolutely and in proportion to the total population. We construct our identity from the bodies of group members. All enduring groups, national or otherwise, rely on just such a sacrificial identity.

The social logic of willing self-sacrifice leaves violence and non-violence indistinguishable, two faces of the cultural coin. But Girard warned if we lose this sacrificial system, we lose societal cohesion and all-against-all violence results. In response to this, conservative Girardians like Gil Bailie, who continue down an orthodox road, believe the sacred has been hijacked by a “deviated transcendence” that will lead to nihilistic violence. He criticizes modern secularism as something that has, as Tracy Rowland says, “ruined and actually denied…the very things it apparently celebrated: embodied life, self-expression, sexuality, aesthetic experience and human political community.”

Bailie denies that mimetic theory expresses “a quintessentially modern liberal point of view: anti-sacrificial, critical of the cultic, favoring the ‘prophetic’ over the ‘priestly’…” (Getting the Anthropology Right ) He seems to be taking liberals at our word, helping us to hide our sacred and perpetuate our myths. Liberal Girardians — many pacifist — are firmly embedded in the sacrificial system, only they make sacrifices of themselves and don’t designate others in their group for sacrifice as traditional religion does. Liberals haven’t lost the sacred or the priestly. (We just don’t trust the men-in-black who, as recently as December, told us they were God’s accountants and had been informed — by email? – that their boss would wipe out our tab in Purgatory if we made a trip across the world to Lourdes.)

When you move from sectarian systems like the Catholic Church to analyzing the myths embedded and hiding in economic systems or national identity, you can’t possibly think the sacred is anywhere but where it’s always been – ennobling the deaths of expendable members of society, whether in liberal nonviolent resistance for Jesus or in conservative pre-emptive war for Freedom. Nationalism (a modern civil religion) as one example of deviated transcendence, has the same structure and virtually identical contingencies as the “true” transcendence offered by conventional religion.

Our era has not witnessed an escalation of violence. This seems to be a fundamental error of the conservative mind-set, one driven by fear of change, a claim that the sky is falling. The results of violence are merely distributed (a little) more fairly and its results are not as euphemized as they were, say, fifty or a thousand years ago. So we see now what was hidden before, and we’ve traded a great deal of oppression for other species of violence (oppression is violence), but it’s probably a zero sum game. Our trust in “holy” violence and sacred symbols is strong as ever.  

“Cohesion in enduring groups is accomplished within a framework of violence as a structural rather than contingent social force, religion as the truth that we are willing to die for, and the re-presentation of society to itself through blood sacrifice rituals performed on the bodies of supplicants.”

Be sure to read Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion  for yourselves if you want to understand the extensive argument and details given that shed light on violence from more angles than just civil religion.