On Human Nature Read online

  According to Girard, primitive societies are invaded by “mimetic desire,” as rivals struggle to match each other’s social and material acquisitions, so heightening antagonism and precipitating the cycle of revenge. The solution is to identify a victim, one marked by fate as “outside” the community and therefore not entitled to vengeance against it, who can be the target of the accumulated bloodlust and who can bring the chain of retribution to an end. Scapegoating is society’s way of recreating “difference” and so restoring itself. By uniting against the scapegoat people are released from their rivalries and reconciled. Through death the scapegoat purges society of its accumulated violence. The scapegoat’s resulting sanctity is the long-term echo of the awe, relief, and visceral reattachment to the community that was experienced at the death. In Girard’s view, we should see a tragedy such as Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus as a retelling of what was originally a ritual sacrifice, in which the victim is chosen so as to focus and confine the need for violence. Through incest, kingship, or worldly hubris the victim is marked out as the outsider, the one who is not with us and whom we can therefore sacrifice without renewing the cycle of revenge. The victim is thus both sacrificed and sacred, the source of the city’s plagues and their cure.

  In many of the Old Testament stories we see the ancient Israelites wrestling with this sacrificial urge. The stories of Cain and Abel, of Abraham and Isaac, and of Sodom and Gomorrah are residues of extended conflicts, by which ritual was diverted from the human victim and attached first to animal sacrifices and finally to sacred words. By this process a viable morality emerged from competition and conflict and from the rivalries of sexual predation. Religion, in Girard’s view, is not the source of violence but the solution to it—the overcoming of mimetic desire and the transcending of the resentments and jealousies into which human communities are tempted by their competitive dynamic.

  The theory is problematic for many reasons, not least because it seems to assume what it is trying to explain—to assume, that is, that the original victim already possesses, in his or her sacrificial state, the aura of sanctity. In this it reproduces the fault exhibited by Nietzsche, in his “genealogy” of morals. Maybe this is a difficulty for all genealogical accounts—either they begin from a state in which the concept is already applied, or they do not succeed in showing how we can come to apply it. Moreover, Girard’s theory seems not to encompass the prime example of the sacred as I have described it: the rite of passage in which the community briefly steps aside from time. Those weaknesses apart, the theory bears on those aspects of morality that are germane to the ethic of pollution and taboo. Sacrifice, death, defilement, and miasma—all these are wrapped together in the primeval sense of the sacred, as an intrusion into the world of human freedom from a place beyond. Sacred things are both forbidden (to the uninitiated) and commanded (to those who would live on the true path). They are revealed in “sacraments”—that is, actions that lift their participants to a higher sphere, setting them down among the immortals. Furthermore they can be desecrated and polluted—and this is the most remarkable feature of them. The one who touches the sacred objects without due reverence or in an “uninitiated” state, or who mocks them or spits on them, commits a kind of metaphysical crime. He or she brings what is sacred into the world of everyday things and wipes away its aura. For this people have traditionally suffered the most dreadful of punishments, and the desire to punish remains to this day. Furthermore, Girard puts before us in vivid terms the connection between the sacred and the sacrificial, as well as the importance to both of these of our nature as mortal and incarnate beings. Death is in the background of all sacred objects and emotions, as the thing that they prefigure or the thing that made them what they are.

  EVOLUTION AND THE SACRED

  Evolutionary psychology will find nothing strange in a view that gives a central place to concepts of pollution, piety, and the sacred in the life of the moral agent. These concepts, and the conceptions that expound them, are easily seen as rationalizations of the “evolutionally stable strategies” of the genes that propel them. And indeed, when it comes to sex and sexual morality, it is remarkable to see how wide is the gulf between what evolutionary psychology would lead us to expect and what liberal morality might acknowledge as legitimate. But I hesitate to rely on evolutionary psychology for the reason that I have already elaborated. A trait is shown to be an “adaptation” just as soon as we can show that its absence will be a genetic disadvantage. In this sense the revulsion against incest is clearly an adaptation. But that says nothing about the thoughts on which the revulsion is founded, nothing about the deep intentionality of the feelings that it purports to explain. It is therefore entirely neutral concerning their real justification and the ontological ground of the concepts used to express them. An evolutionary psychology of religion will almost certainly show religious belief to be a reproductive advantage, in just the way that mathematical competence is a reproductive advantage (the others have all died out).10 But evolutionary psychology will leave questions of religious epistemology where they were, just as it leaves the standard of mathematical proof unaltered.

  Hence we cannot rely on evolutionary psychology to underpin the concepts and conceptions that I have been considering. Even if we accept the elaborate story told by Girard concerning the origin of the notion of the sacred in scapegoating and ritual violence, this does not entitle us to that concept or to the remarkable conceptions that go with it. For sacred things are seen as belonging to another order than the order of the empirical world. They are visitors from another sphere: they mark the places in the empirical world from which we look out toward the transcendental. We could justify describing them in this way only negatively, by showing the inadequacy of any purely empirical analysis to capture their content while insisting that it is a genuine content and one that we clearly understand.

  SOME REMARKS ABOUT EVIL

  My argument is pushing me toward a difficult position: I want to say both that concepts such as piety, pollution, and the sacred are necessary to us and that their meaning and basis can be derived from the philosophy of the freely choosing person, as I have expounded this. Without transgressing the ontological assumptions of liberal contractarianism, I want to restore the complete picture of the embodied moral agent, as we know this from the literature, art, and religion of our civilization. Other concepts too are involved in filling out the picture, notably the concepts of beauty and of evil. The first of those I have dealt with elsewhere.11 In lieu of a conclusion to an argument that has opened onto a wide intellectual landscape, I shall make a few remarks about the second of those ideas, ponder its connection with the religious worldview, and leave it to the reader to reflect on how the arguments of this chapter might be incorporated into a believable theory of the person.

  We distinguish people who are evil from those who are merely bad. Bad people are like you or me, only worse. They belong in the community, even if they behave badly toward it. We can reason with them, improve them, come to terms with them, and, in the end, accept them. They are made, like us, from “the crooked timber of humanity.”12 But there are evil people who are not like that, since they do not belong in the community, even if residing within its territory. Their bad behavior may be too secret and subversive to be noticeable, and any dialogue with them will be, on their part, a pretense. There is, in them, no scope for improvement, no path to acceptance, and even if we think of them as human, their faults are not of the normal, remediable human variety but have another and more metaphysical origin. They are visitors from another sphere, incarnations of the Devil. Even their charm—and it is a recognized fact that evil people are often charming—is only further proof of their Otherness. They are, in some sense, the negation of humanity, wholly and unnaturally at ease with the thing that they seek to destroy.

  That characterization of evil is summarized in the famous line that Goethe gives to Mephistopheles: “Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint” [I am the spirit that
forever negates]. Whereas the bad person is guided by self-interest, to the point of ignoring or overriding the others who stand in his or her path, the evil person is profoundly interested in others, has almost selfless designs on them. The aim is not to use them, as Faust uses Gretchen, but to rob them of themselves. Mephistopheles hopes to steal and destroy Faust’s soul and, en route to that end, to destroy the soul of Gretchen. Nowadays we might use the word self instead of soul, in order to avoid religious connotations. But this word is only another name for the same metaphysical mystery around which our lives are built—the mystery of the subjective viewpoint. Evil people are not necessarily threats to your body; but they are threats to your self.

  We should not be surprised to find, therefore, that evil people are often opaque to us. However lucid their thoughts, however transparent their deeds, their motives are somehow uncanny, inexplicable, even supernatural. Mephistopheles’s affability and charm do not disguise the inner torment that he brings with him from the place where he resides. But when it comes to Iago, for example, the villain of Shakespeare’s play Othello, we are puzzled. We are convinced by him as a character; but our conviction stems from the awe that Iago creates in us. Through his words and deeds Iago prompts the stunned recognition that he really means to destroy Othello, that there is no sufficient motive apart from the desire to do this terrible thing, and that there is no plea or reasoning that could deflect him from his path. After all, Iago seeks to destroy Othello by causing Othello to destroy Desdemona, who has done Iago no wrong. It is the incomprehensible, as it were noumenal, nature of Iago’s motive that enables him so effectively to conceal it. Peering into Iago’s soul we find a void, a nothingness; like Mephistopheles, he is a great negation, a soul composed of antispirit, as a body might be composed of antimatter.

  The evil person is like a fracture in our human world, through which we catch glimpses of the void. And here, it seems to me, is one explanation of the phenomenon summed up by Hannah Arendt in the phrase “the banality of evil,” which she used to describe what she saw as the bureaucratic mind-set of Adolf Eichmann.13 The terrible destruction that has been wrought, and deliberately wrought, on human beings in recent times, in the name of this or that political ideology, has not typically been wrought by evil people. As a matter of fact, as Bettina Stangneth has shown, Eichmann was a pathological hater of Jews and by no means the self-regarding bureaucrat imagined by Arendt.14 But we can readily assume that Arendt’s false description of Eichmann applies truly to other commandants of the concentration camps, many of whom were bureaucrats, given to obeying orders and willing to sacrifice their conscience to their own security when the time to disobey had come. The torture, degradation, and death that it was their role to oversee might not have been, in their own eyes, their doing but, rather, the inevitable effects of a machine that had been set in motion without their help. Evil occurred around them, but it was not something that they did.

  Of course, we repudiate the excuses of such people and hold them answerable for the suffering that they might—at a cost—have remedied. We recognize that the death camp was not just a bad thing that happened but an evil that was done. And all the officials were implicated in this evil. As Arendt and Stangneth both point out, the camps were designed not merely to destroy human beings but also to deprive them of their humanity. The inmates were to be treated as things, humiliated, degraded, reduced to a condition of bare, unsupported, and all-consuming need, which would cancel in them the last vestiges of freedom. In other words the goal included that pursued in one way by Iago and in another way by Mephistopheles, which was to rob the inmates of their souls. The camps were animated by antispirit, and people caught up in them stumbled around as though burdened by a great negation sign. These antihumans were repulsive and verminous to those permitted to observe them. Hence their extermination could be represented as necessary, and their disappearance into a shared forgetfulness became the spiritual equivalent of matter tumbling into a black hole.

  We should not understand the camps, therefore, as dreadful in the way that an earthquake, a forest fire, or a famine is dreadful, even though these natural disasters may produce suffering on just as great a scale. The camps did not exist to produce suffering only; they were designed to eradicate the humanity of their victims. They were ways of using the body to destroy the embodied subject. Once the soul was wiped away, the destruction of the body would not be perceived as murder but, rather, only as a kind of pest control. And I would identify this as a paradigm of evil: namely, the attempt or desire to destroy the soul of another, so that his or her value and meaning are rubbed out. Thus the torturer wishes the will, freedom, conscience, and integrity of the victim to be destroyed by pain, in order to relish the sight of what Sartre tellingly describes as “freedom abjured.”15 In other words, the torturer is using the body to dominate and destroy another’s first-person being and delighting in the ruin and humiliation that can be brought about through pain.

  I have described the death camps in terms of a purpose. But whose purpose, exactly? This question brings us face-to-face with another of the mysteries of evil, and it is one that has exercised many writers in recent times, from Orwell to Solzhenitsyn. Ask of any individual whether he or she intended the degradation of the death camps, and often it is hard to find an answer. Of course, some of the Nazi leaders, Eichmann included, did intend this, since they were animated by a hatred that demanded the extremes of maltreatment. In the Soviet case, however, the camps continued long after the death of Lenin, Stalin, and their entourage, when nobody existed who had ever intended this result, when possibly even those involved in overseeing the system regretted its existence and when none who made the crucial decisions saw themselves as anything but helpless cogs in the machine.16

  To say, as many do, that the camps were the work of the Devil is to repeat the problem, not to solve it. For why is it that just this metaphor intrudes upon our language when we try to do justice to the facts? The question parallels that of human freedom. From the standpoint of biological science, freedom too may seem like a metaphor: but the concept is forced upon us by life itself, as we strive to relate to each other as human beings. It is, in my view, the greatest of Kant’s insights to have recognized that we are compelled by the very effort of communication to treat each other not as mere organisms or things but as persons who act freely, who are rationally accountable, and who must be treated as ends in themselves. And even if we think Kant’s theory of freedom to be a metaphysical error, there is no denying the phenomenon that it attempts to explain. Likewise we may dismiss this or that theory of evil as fraught with unwarranted metaphysical assumptions. But the phenomenon itself is metaphysical—not of this world, though in it—and this compels us to describe it as we do.

  MORALS AND FAITH

  The concept of evil, like that of the sacred, describes forces that seem to impinge on our lives from elsewhere. Our understanding of these forces has the same kind of overreaching intentionality that I ascribe to interpersonal reactions. As is implied in the first chapter, there is, in our outlook on the world, an apprehension of the transcendent—a reaching beyond what is given to the inaccessible horizon of the other self.17 This apprehension informs all our interpersonal dealings; but it also invades our experience as a whole. It is an experience whose ineffability is part of what is valued: for it turns us toward a sphere that cannot be reached by any merely human effort and cannot be known except in this way.

  There is a tradition in philosophy, beginning with Plato, that regards the doctrines of divine reward and punishment less as a support for the moral life than as a way of demeaning it. Defenders of this tradition are right to insist that the moral motive is different from the hopes and fears with which religions back it up. Nevertheless, the connection between morality and religion is not an accident, and the considerations raised in this chapter show why that is so. As persons we make ourselves accountable for our actions and states of mind. The very habit of finding reasons that would
justify us in others’ eyes leads us to demand such reasons of ourselves. Hence even when we are unobserved, we are judged. The awareness of our faults can weigh us down: we seek exoneration and are often remorseful, without knowing the human person to whom an appeal for forgiveness can be made. This is what is meant by original sin, “the crime of existence itself,” as Schopenhauer put it—das Schuld des Daseins, the fault of existing as an individual, in free relations with our kind.18

  Such guilt feelings may be more or less strong. Some people are experts at entertaining them—Al-Ghazālī, for example, Kierkegaard, Novalis. Even in normal people, hommes moyens sensuels, these everyday feelings survive the attempt to quiet them. And they prompt the great yearning that finds a voice in tragic art and which engages with our most urgent loves and fears in this world: the yearning for redemption, for the blessing that relieves us of our guilt. Glimpses of this blessing are afforded by such liminal experiences as falling in love, recovering from illness, becoming a parent, and encountering in awe the sublime works of nature. At these moments we stand at the threshold of the transcendental, reaching out to what cannot be attained or known. And that to which we reach, because it promises redemption, must be understood in personal terms. It is the soul of the world, the first-person singular that spoke to Moses from the burning bush.