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A review by lee_foust
Violence and the Sacred by René Girard
5.0
Oh, how I love reading anthropology! Just when I get caught up in the endless facebook stream of arguments and memes--religion, politics, TV, and corporate-controlled and produced mass culture--I step back into a culturally removed, dispassionate space and compare my culture to ancient Greece, or the Bushmen, or some tribe in Borneo and understand how silly and deadly serious are our bizarre choices manifest as cultural institutions. Perspective is everything. So refreshing.
Girard's arguments here are amply summed-up and synopsized elsewhere (even on this page by one Jennifer who does a fine, exhaustive job) so I'll leave it to you to explore this book and its detailed contents on your own. It posits that human culture begins with groups of people attempting to deal with the problem of human-on-human violence through the institution of sacrifice and the argument is largely convincing. The argument is also soiled/weakened somewhat by being both too strenuously (and repetitively) argued and, as in most blanket, all-encompassing theories of anything (particularly ALL world cultures) there has to be a reductionist element and a "latency" clause so that anything that doesn't fit into the system actually fits into the system by not fitting into the system. Still. 99% of the non-fiction books published are useless self help, celebrity gossip, and silly politicians arguing battles that philosophers solved centuries ago but the common idiot can still not grasp with their nationalistic education and superstitious adherence to religion. So five fucking stars to a real thinker and the finger to all major publishing houses, the MacDonalds-s of contemporary culture!
We need more scapegoats after all. As Girard points out, poets are anti-social because we pity the scapegoat. I'd like to see society sacrificed so that one outsider might finally realize him/herself as both the sacred and the profane. A true deity? Who wants all that order anyway?
We're still the flowers in the dustbin.
Girard's arguments here are amply summed-up and synopsized elsewhere (even on this page by one Jennifer who does a fine, exhaustive job) so I'll leave it to you to explore this book and its detailed contents on your own. It posits that human culture begins with groups of people attempting to deal with the problem of human-on-human violence through the institution of sacrifice and the argument is largely convincing. The argument is also soiled/weakened somewhat by being both too strenuously (and repetitively) argued and, as in most blanket, all-encompassing theories of anything (particularly ALL world cultures) there has to be a reductionist element and a "latency" clause so that anything that doesn't fit into the system actually fits into the system by not fitting into the system. Still. 99% of the non-fiction books published are useless self help, celebrity gossip, and silly politicians arguing battles that philosophers solved centuries ago but the common idiot can still not grasp with their nationalistic education and superstitious adherence to religion. So five fucking stars to a real thinker and the finger to all major publishing houses, the MacDonalds-s of contemporary culture!
We need more scapegoats after all. As Girard points out, poets are anti-social because we pity the scapegoat. I'd like to see society sacrificed so that one outsider might finally realize him/herself as both the sacred and the profane. A true deity? Who wants all that order anyway?
We're still the flowers in the dustbin.