Cool Titles

I've started reading books mainly cause they have cool titles.  Like, I'm finishing "Violence and the Sacred," by Rene Girard right now.  What's it about?  Does it really matter?  It's called "Violence and the Sacred," what does it need to be about?  Something something mimetic desire and the monstrous double, the inherent rivalry that rises as difference disappears, the pharmokon that is both the poison and the cure, the scapegoat that short-circuits the endless cycle of retributive violence, critiques of Freud, Levi-Strauss, Sophocles, yadda yadda yadda.

And the tome does have some potentially illuminating insights on real world issues--the Croats and the Serbs, for example, have mutually intelligible languages, their tongues are more closely related than the various dialects of Italian, or of Chinese, or even between Spanish and Portuguese.  Yet the Croats and the Serbs don't exactly get along.  The Uzbeks and the Tajiks are also incredibly similar groups that are at each others' throats.  So why all this hatred between such similar groups?  Girard would argue that it's precisely because they are so similar that there's so much rivalry.

The fewer differences there are between two groups, the greater the significance of the differences that do exist--e.g. in Northern Ireland, your pronunciation of the letter h is what gives you away as Protestant or Catholic, and heaven help you if you wander into the wrong neighborhood in Belfast.  Same goes for Israel/Palestine, a region fought over desperately by two Semetic groups of a common Abrahamic heritage.  The problem, I believe Girard would say, isn't that they're so different--oh goodness no, it's that they're so much the same!  You'd think that these two religious traditions would understand the atoning need for a scapegoat, a pharmakos to short-circuit the endless cycle of violence, above all others.  But as Girard points out in his reading of "Oedipus Rex," it is precisely the one who is too close to the violence who is least able to observe one's key role in it.  Oedipus, recall, didn't realize the tragedy he had been inadvertently causing all along until it was too late.

Girard then worries about how similar we are all becoming today--thanks to mass-markets and globalization, the world is more alike than it ever was before.  My Mom, I remember, was opposed to the formation of the E.U. for strictly cultural reasons, because of how she feared the Euro would erase the continent's rich cultural distinctions, and lead to the McDonaldization of Europe as had already sadly happened in America.  One of my roommates believes that Western culture was the first casualty of globalization, the same Borg-like force that now goes about assimilating the cultural-distinctiveness of other civilizations. 

As globalization erases differences, then rivalry for the same finite resources increases.  The nations of Europe were so economically-interconnected that they assumed World War I could never happen.  The U.S.'s biggest trade partner before WWII was Japan.  For Girard, globalization is not encouraging but frightening, an erasure of difference and distinctiveness that begets ever increasing violence, a violence that primitive people genuinely feared could consume and wipe-out entire communities, a fear not lessened but accentuated by modern man, especially with the pall of thermonuclear holocaust still hanging over us all. 

Clear back in 1972, Girard saw how similar we were all becoming--and we still had the Soviet Union as a counter-culture to the West.  But then, as Milan Kundera makes clear in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," the Soviet Union was a very conformist-heavy regime, inflicting a debilitating sameness on everything.  But the West, however, with its mass-fashion-movements, commodification of dissent, dress-codes, obsession with "marketability," Houses of Un-American Activities, and large, gray, square, uniform, unimaginative Borg-cubes for buildings, is surely not less conformist.  It is a difference not of kind, but of degree--the Soviets enforced conformity at gun-point, the West merely enforces conformity through market pressures.  But the end-result of both is an erasure of difference, which, says Girard, does not increase societal cohesion, but destabilizes it. 

But in the end, I read "Violence and the Sacred" not to enlighten me on current sociopolitical problems, but because "Violence and the Sacred" is a frickin' cool title.  I'm next going to read "Anti-Oedipus," the first volume in "Capitalism and Schizophrenia," because hey, with a title like that, why wouldn't I read it?