On Monday, as I watched Dominic Cummings’ very own ‘agony in the garden’, I kept thinking about the French philosopher René Girard.
Girard crossed the boundaries of disciplines ranging from anthropology and history to economics and theology. His major contribution was to the study of the human person and human violence — why do we appear so ready to commit violent acts? His answer was ‘mimetic desire’; the idea that by imitating the desires of others we learn to desire the very same things. The catch is that coveting objects so intensely leads to rivalry and, eventually, violence.
The process, of course, is a spiral. Once begun, rivalry and violence can only grow, eventually threatening to destroy the community. Something must be done to prevent a total collapse.
That something, in nearly all cultures, is the destruction of the scapegoat; a single individual who acts as the focus of all aggression, uniting former rivals in the project of his or her obliteration. If the sanctity of the community is at risk — as in the plague-ravaged Thebes of Oedipus Rex or lockdown Britain — the scapegoat must be eliminated. Only then will peace return.
The Cummings scandal is a Girardian moment in its fullest sense; a confluence of extraordinary pressures and circumstances, fuelled by indignation, rising tension, and the need to exorcise communal aggression. Crucially, the analysis holds regardless of whether or not we think Cummings guilty of the infractions he is accused of committing.
Were Girard still with us (he died in 2015), he might firstly have noted that freedom during lockdown is a dangerously finite good. The more someone else breaks the rules, meeting up with friends or travelling outside their home, the longer lockdown lasts for the rest of us. Your desire for freedom competes directly with mine. The fact that Cummings was himself partly the originator of these rules only exacerbates the dynamic.
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