Hmmm, the previous blog points to a type of mimetic rivalry that would yield reproductive advantage under the selection pressures of intergroup competition.

But of course, such a ‘thing’ …

…was not meant to last, at least as far as human evolution goes.

In the milieu of unconstrained complexity, inaugurated 7800 years ago, the desire “to sacrifice oneself for the most important object in the group, in mimesis of the desire held by all the others in the group” became a fool’s errand.

Someone, by manipulating the symbolic order, could accrue the rewards and the credit for your sacrifice.

Plus, in a strange variant of the predator-prey relation, someone could demand your sacrifice because “you should feel that you should sacrifice yourself for the most important object in the group”.

And, for that special someone, it is that Special Someone: ‘me’.

How would the idea of “mimesis” apply to our evolved Lebenswelt of constrained complexity, marked by selection pressures of intergroup competition?

What advantage would there be for each person to desire the same thing (that someone else desires) and to unconsciously deny that the other person – somehow – inspired the desire?

I cannot see an advantage, except for one circumstance.

What if that “thing” was an “object that was the most important object in the group”?

What if that object was so important that each person – by ‘himself’ (but in mimetic desire) – was open to sacrificing ‘himself’ for this object?

What if each person would seek opportunities to engage in some life and death struggle centered on the object?

If so, then any person in the group could be a hero, even in death, especially if ‘his’ death ended a horrible passage and allowed others to continue to live, that is, to keep the object alive.

To keep the object alive was to keep the group alive.  To keep the object alive was to allow your parents, your children, your cousins, your brothers and sisters, to live.

Still, we are led to the question:

How did Girard’s “mimetic rivalry” operate in the Lebenswelt of constrained complexity, that is, in the Lebenswelt that we evolved in?

How could “mimetic rivalry” have enhanced “reproductive success” (the new term for “survival of the fittest”)?

It seems to me that “mimetic rivalry”, as Girard formulates the concept, would have increased intragroup competition and conflict (even with the catharsis of scapegoating).  Mimetic rivalry would have diminished reproductive success in a world of intergroup competition.

Lately, I have been wresting (if blogging can be called that) with Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of a “scandal” in biology.

God declared His Creation “good” in Genesis. However, natural evil is intrinsic to evolution.  This is a scandal.

Coincidently, I came across a book on scandal in the tradition of Rene Girard, entitled Beneath the Veil of Strange Verses: Reading Scandalous Texts, by Jeremiah L. Alberg (East Lansing: Michigan University Press).

So, a diversion is in order.

My electronic book, An Archaeology of the Fall (2012), complements Alberg’s exploration, in a way that would make Flannery O’Connor proud.  If you read it, you will see what I mean.

You will also see why Rene Girard has appeared on my radar, not as dramatically as Charles Peirce and John Deely, or Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zizek, or Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, but there, nevertheless.  So far, I have contemplated his work through the eyes of his admirers.