Bulletin 64 – May 2020

However, French malaise exists. The French are said to suffer from the spoiled child syndrome. All benefits are perceived as due. Worse, the public services of the state, and of the local authorities, cautious and frightened by the virus, did not bring the original support of the civil servants to the service of the national and territorial communities. Too many families with children, young people with disabilities, and retirees were left alone because of the lack of civil servants willing to perform their function. Many workers made use of their right of withdrawal (droit de retrait) citing the mental stress they incurred, despite the fact that physical and health distancing measures were guaranteed. Today in mid-May, the second day of easing the lock down, there remain problems with public transport and the opening of schools, et cetera. The “quarrelsome French” sees the virus everywhere and rebel at the idea of going back to work by brandishing their freedom not to work, forgetting Kennedy’s phrase, more pertinent in France than where it came from: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

While part of France is reluctant to return to work out of fear or too high self-esteem, an apparently opposite situation occurs in the United States. Perhaps under the conservative influence of President Trump but also under that of the media, not to mention the social media, more and more governors are reflecting on how to reduce the restrictions on the lockdown in the face of certain citizens frustrated by the economic downturn—while the country holds sadly the highest record of victims of coronavirus. In such a climate pushed by “anti-lockdown” demonstrators meeting to challenge the lockdown regulations, more and more are asked to return to work as soon as possible. Here too, the most vulnerable, such as the African-American minority, are suffering the most deaths per capita from the pandemic.

What do these two scenarios reveal to us? At first glance, two identities (France, United States) seem to be opposed. Yet we are faced with the same radical identity which has lost the will to live together and is detached totally from any inclusive perspective. This identity is separated from the other, from “we.” The common good is sacrificed for the benefit of the almighty self. Ontological disease is rampant everywhere, just as much as the coronavirus, and has equally infested the person. Dostoevsky spoke of the underground man, that is to say the one filled with resentment who knows no borders. Finally, if there is a war, the enemy is not “the other” but rather oneself, and his or her hubris. It will be necessary that each of us “prevents oneself,” in the depths of ourselves, in order to overcome all the crises, as Albert Camus, evoking his father, observed: “No, one prevents oneself, or otherwise…”—knowing that at this depth, it is essential that everyone is co-owner of the common good and co-producer of the decisions.

Socrates, at the beginning of his first speech in Plato’s Apology, says that he wants to tell the truth and that he trusts that what he says is just (pisteio gar dikaia einai a lego). Justice as the foundation of truth, therefore. But what justice—and therefore what truth—can we draw from these prophets of disaster that seem to abound today, in these times of pandemic? Or what truth are we talking about? Well, the truth that seems to be the only kind of truth that interests us: the truth of the madmen, the murderers, the expelled, the sacrificed, the detritus of society in the words of Zygmunt Bauman, in a prescient conference in 2005—“the waste of modern progress.” Now, how does this truth come to us? Let me be clear, frank, and direct—for perhaps not truthful: it comes directly from the victims in general. To grab truth understood as power, we need scapegoats. That is to say—you will forgive the baroque figure—the truth that tells us who is guilty of what is really happening, where by “guilty” we mean “victims.” By lynching, we are venting the frustration we feel at not going out, not having our freedom, not having access to many of our possessions—secondary residences, cars, offices, sports center memberships, clinics, and a long et cetera—everything done for the common good. Sacrificing our freedoms for the common good does not seem to be enough, we need to sacrifice someone else: the Chinese, the Italians, the Fallas, the May 8th demonstrations, the VOX rally, politicians skipping quarantine, the businessmen who lay off, the teachers who do not take into account the technological gap for some  families, the neighbor of the 6th who plays the Spanish anthem at 8pm every day, the neighbors upstairs who make so much noise—what a lack of solidarity! All of them have been “lynched” by some and by others throughout these weeks. The real pandemic, the one that lurks behind any plague, any social or metaphysical disease, is the mimetic pandemic—the mimetic capacity for accusation.

That “mimetic pandemic” has found a way of expression on the balconies, where we have gone out to applaud from the first day at 8 pm. We paid tribute to all the heroes of this war: health professionals, security forces, food professionals, and a long et cetera: fallen in combat. We applauded our older and younger people for staying home for two months: not going out for anything, or almost anything. At the same time, however, those same people, from those same balconies, have protested by beating pots and pans –“caceroladas”– against each other; from those balconies we have symbolically lynched kings, as if the monarchy were to blame for this; the President, as if we were sure that anyone else in power would have done better. But we have also lynched the neighbor who was walking down the street carefree, who was desperately taking his children for a walk. We have created some neologisms, “balcony police” and “balconazi,” which reflect the mimetic wisdom that exists in all cultures, a wisdom that will soon be méconnué, forgotten. Polarization, most of it caused by politicians and worried citizens, has reduced politics to a speech of rival sides.

We run the risk of falling into what Agamben could call a permanent state of emergency: the permanent surveillance of society with the uncertain threat of an intangible risk. Fear plays a fundamental role. This pandemic has shown us a truth that has been little explored from the point of view of mimetic theory, and which we should explore: solidarity balconies coexist with Bentham’s panopticon. The most exalted health professionals’ sacrifice coexists with measures that can be considered eugenic when having to choose, following exclusively utilitarian criteria, who to attend to—for example, by reason of age. The bad mimesis, the collective behavior, the phantom of the ego agitated by populists and fascists, coexists these days with the good mimesis, the positive mimesis, that of the converted who knows he is guilty and who puts all his efforts into caring for the other, into obeying the law in a Socratic way, into keeping his anger in the knowledge that it is as unjust as the anger that the other exhibits, if it leads only to an accusation that seeks his own salvation. The truth is that holiness –understood in mimetic terms– lives hidden in the small true gestures of true justice.

Does this mean that we must lose hope? No, far from it. It simply means that in order to act in this context we have to be able to “see” that the worst is yet to come, that it is our responsibility to believe it and act accordingly and that, paradoxically, believing that, that the worst is yet to come, that it will become a reality, will be the only thing that will prevent it, that it is already preventing it.  Because the worst is already here, coming. Girard closes his last book, Achever Clausewitz, with the following words: “vouloir rassurer, c’est toujours contribuer au pire” (seeking to comfort is always to contribute to the worst). The prophet is the one who disturbs, the one who brings us out of our quietness. Paradoxically, in these moments of self-isolation (closure) and stillness, these contemporary prophets ask us for metanoia, change of thought, conversion. Dupuy in his Petit métaphysique du tsunamis quotes in this sense Gunter Anders, the prophet of the nuclear catastrophe. Another Jewish philosopher, Hans Jonas, in his The Imperative of Responsibility, tells us: “It is the rule, stated primitively that the prophecy of doom is to be given greater heed than the prophecy of bliss.”

What explains such behaviour? A supermarket employee put it like this: “The question on everyone’s minds at work: Why are they buying everything? One customer summed it up: ‘Because everyone else is.’” Steven Taylor, an expert on the psychology of pandemics, says that panic buying is a sign of human herd behaviour common to pandemics: “It always happens. It’s a kind of a mass hysteria.”

Girard provides a scientific explanation for this kind of hysteria and herd behaviour: it occurs because humans are sophisticated imitators, driven by the mimetic nature of their desire. Human desire is not structured by mythical “individual preferences” or primarily by pre-programmed instincts but by what they perceive others want (mimesis).

During social contagions, human desire intensely fires from multiple points of stimulation, such that it is difficult to resist. As people act on their mimetic desires, they compete with others, which validates such desires in a perverse feedback loop. Girard remarks (I See Satan Fall like Lightning, p. 10): “In imitating my rival’s desire I give him [or her] the impression that he has good reasons to desire what he desires, to possess what he possesses, and so the intensity of his desire keeps increasing.”

Such desire intensifies even more if the objects of desire become scarce. Under such intensification, acquisitive desires and behaviours multiply. These lead us to de-humanise others and become violent. As a supermarket employee stated: “We were being bombarded daily with abuse from the public. They were talking to us like we weren’t even human.”

Most shocking of all has been the abuse and violence against health care workers. For example, the New South Wales Nurses and Midwives’ Association reported that a pregnant midwife was abused at a Macdonald’s restaurant in Sydney: “When showing her ID for a free coffee, a driver behind her yelled that she should not be spreading the virus.”

This kind of behavior is even harder to understand than hysterical panic-buying, at least in a moral sense. It is not a rational response—the medical worker is low risk. Rather, it is a social response, driven by the same mimetic dynamics as the panic-buying. Vulnerable people, who are accused of being contagious, are targeted and scapegoated by groups acting mimetically, so to make themselves feel better, united and in control.

Girard identifies how, in a social crisis (even one with roots in disease), humans are commonly driven by a fear of contagion—whether rational or not. This is because a crisis is like a contagion: the fear and insecurity infects everyone so that everyone imitates each other frenetically, until it becomes “all against all.” So everyone is afraid of an infection that will mimetically spread. Those regarded as impure must be segregated and scapegoated. Only purification can restore order, which occurs through strict prohibitions, segregation, and sacrifice—as health care workers and others accused of being infectious have experienced.

Thus, while social distancing is an appropriate scientific strategy to combat pandemics, it is imbued with a troubling social and religious history. Without recourse to scientific and legal systems, human societies have traditionally been fixated on purity and impurity. This has re-surfaced in our current pandemic with stories of random people and their businesses, such as those of Chinese ancestry (who have often lived outside of China for generations), being avoided and ostracised because they are thought to be infectious. There have even been reports of racist abuse and mob violence. The archaic fear of impurity and contagion re-surfaces, then, in irrational ways.

Girard also argues that sympathy for victims in modern societies has made sacrificial mechanisms, such as segregation and scapegoating, less effective in controlling social contagion, even as we understand better than ever the need for separation to control medical contagion. The undermining of sacrificial mechanisms, however, opens opportunities for positive forms of imitation and solidarity to fill the gap. These have already been crucial for a sustained and sensible effort to eradicate COVID-19. Heroic medical professionals who have put themselves at risk to treat the infected are clearly positive role models. They have stimulated better behavior and everyday heroism, as the viral cry has gone out: “We came to work for you. Please stay home for us.”

It is also shown in “caremongering” or the “kindness pandemic” where people give out toilet paper, like at Secret Market Square in Western Australia. In doing this, people show that they are willing to share objects of desire, rather than fight over them. This is a major social break-through. In this, we become more than pre-rational imitators, but self-conscious, social beings who rationally choose to seek the good (stimulated by the example of others) and find fulfilment in their solidarity with others.

Sometimes this solidarity calls us to sacrifice for the good of others, over and above the satisfaction of my immediate desires. In the current crisis, this means social distancing and isolation. As David Brooks puts it: “It’s an odd kind of heroism this crisis calls for. Those also serve who endure and wait.”

The political irony was too obvious for almost anyone not to see. In a deep Republican state which broke sharply for Trump in 2016, the face of the Coronavirus was not brown, poor, and foreign; instead it was white and wealthy. The locales in need of bleach and deep cleaning were in the wealthy neighborhood of Ladue, not the gritty and underfunded city of Saint Louis, which people who live in Ladue and comparable suburbs tend to avoid like the plague.

Political ironies aside, it is worth looking at Girard. I, like many of you, dusted off my copy of “To Double-Business Bound,” and read the poignant chapter on plagues in literature. His book on Job, however, seemed most helpful to understand what was happening in Saint Louis. Job, after all, is the biblical embodiment of privilege. Yet he was also a victim abandoned by his friends like a bad habit once his fortunes changed. Our nice, lily-white family in Saint Louis was an unexpected object of scapegoating, but not an unsuitable one. At first, we learned that the father and younger daughter were told to quarantine, and defiantly attended the dance. The dialogue went through our minds: well, we aren’t sick, so why should we stay locked up? All of your friends will be there, and we already bought the dress. We have to go! The entire Saint Louis area focused its rage on one family, whom we believed was solely responsible for the spread of COVID-19 that was surely to come. I would not be surprised if their lives were threatened. The local police stationed an officer in front of their house for protection. A few days later, as the rage reached a crescendo, the family issued a statement through their lawyer that no health official had told anyone, besides the daughter who tested positive, to quarantine.

Eventually the story became yesterday’s news as the city went into lockdown. In looking at the numbers and the rate of the spread, it became unfeasible to think that a city with a greater metro population of nearly three million could keep the virus out, short of an enormous protective bubble. And two months after that story peaked, the days when one family could be the face of COVID-19 in Saint Louis seem like a distant memory.

On the day in question, outside my local supermarket, I’d seen a bedraggled elderly man clearly in need of help—he was struggling with his cart and couldn’t find where he’d parked his car; and then when at last he found it, he had great trouble unloading his groceries. It was agonizing to watch (I was just one of several bystanders witnessing the scene) because, rather suddenly it seemed, the ordinary rules according to which any one of us would have jumped without a thought to help this man had been thrown into question. Though it was early in the pandemic, we already knew of asymptomatic transmission: Would helping him potentially kill him, and/or his wife, who had been waiting in the car? Everything seemed turned on its head. Would the obviously right thing to do in pre-pandemic circumstances be wrong, harmful, even lethal? Would the seemingly wrong thing be the best and most caring way to proceed? How does one act in such a world? It felt as if my mental distress were mirroring the man’s physical travail. In the end, unable to bear it any longer, I asked his permission, helped him unload his groceries, took his cart, and went on my way. But the episode left me ill at ease.

My account in the Post didn’t explicitly apply mimetic theory, though that was, as ever, close to mind as I thought about what had happened. There was the tense presence of onlookers: Would they think me reckless? Would I make myself a target of accusation? In the weeks since, at least here in America, such accusations have flown bitterly against both the non-compliant and those whose job it is to require compliance, sometimes even to the point of violence. What I experienced had in its own way an apocalyptic feel to it. Something undeniably revelatory occurred. As in all such revelations, it was unsettling not least because it was only partially yet intelligible. The only thing that seemed certain was that we truly have breached the threshold of some brave new world. While the light it casts on our old life has been both penetrating and duly harsh, what exactly this new life is and will be remains unknown.

Such revelation was not, however, what most Washington Post readers took from my piece, at least to judge by the two hundred or so who posted comments. A large majority of them praised my piece—a welcome sign, if you are familiar with typical Washington Post commenters. A few scoffed that there had never been any “moral ambiguity.” One attacked the elderly for supposedly voting for Trump. But most of them, whatever their views, chimed the reassurance: “You did the right thing,” sometimes tagging on an “Of course.” Perhaps I failed to adequately communicate the nature of the quandary I had found myself in; or perhaps I had, and they reflexively wanted to close the shutters on the troubling vista it opened upon.

On later reflection I came to think I had done the right thing, but reassurance was not what I was going for in the piece. At least part of what came to light was that the moral ambiguity that had been laid bare in the parking lot is in some sense the state of things all the time, at least for Christians, who are paradoxically taught to turn the other cheek, forgive always, and, most scandalously, love our enemies. In times of normalcy—and we should now know only too well to hold that category “under suspicion,” especially as we long for its return in one semblance or another—we tend to think that morality is frankly not all that that ambiguous. “Of course” you do this; “of course” you don’t do that. This is particularly true with respect to much of what passes for civil ethics—the ethics of, for example, Camus’s restaurant manager. There are always clear enough markers as to who is good, who is bad; who is suspect, who is above suspicion; who is deserving of help, who undeserving. Such normalcy is easily perverted into and indeed is already a kind of backstop self-righteousness, assuring us of our essential goodness, our exceptionality to being complicit in the world’s cruelties and injustices.

Worse, I think, this normalcy comes with assurances that we are self-sufficient individuals, safely autonomous in our comfortable judgments, as long as we each behave according to the rules of order. The restaurant manager’s morality, which is that of most of us, most of the time, is a kind of immunization against recognizing, as my supermarket parking lot moment reminded me, that even as our civilization distributes vulnerability and injustice with callous indifference, we are deeply, interdividually implicated in one another. Tout le monde est suspecte—including ourselves. But that also means that most especially now, paradoxically perhaps in this time of isolation and aloneness, we are in a position to see unblinkingly that “We are one body.” The pandemic reveals this, but it is not a condition specially mediated by pandemic. It’s the way the universe was created.

Moral life calls us to act, not merely behave, to apply one of Hannah Arendt’s indispensable distinctions. Action in its very essence is risky, always exposing the one who acts to mimetically sacrificial processes. The potential for complicity in those processes is also unavoidable; no utilitarian calculus or pragmatic moral triage will save us from that. It is love, strangely, that is the only antidote, whether it protects us or not. In La Peste, things do not end well for the Othon family. But Mme. Othon did the right thing.

A first finding of our sciences is the social nature of humanity. Each of us becomes who she is through layers and networks of relations, encompassing (i) acculturation to those nearby, or what René Girard called mimesis, and (ii) the effects of relationships that extend out in our paths of global connectedness. Our educational and economic opportunities and, as we’re emphatically learning, our life and death are affected by those who are not necessarily close.

Equally as important as Girard’s analysis of “conflictual mimesis” is “positive mimesis,” the basis for human development and societal glue. As Marc Kissel and Nam Kim note of the grim compendium of early human violence that ostensibly shows our violent nature,  it “represents only a tiny portion of the human evolutionary record” (151).

The rest of the record shows, with Girard, the importance of our relational, mimetic, indeed “mutualistic” and “cooperative” nature, as Frans de Waal writes. Evolutionary pressures yielded episodic aggression and opportunistic raiding where advantageous. Yet cooperativity and egalitarianism (including communal property and childcare) along with robust fairness and sharing norms were the hunter gatherer modus vivendi for 250,000 or so years.

Mimesis was the basis for human cognitive and emotional development, which begin in the playful exchange of facial expression between human infants and their kin and non-kin caretakers. Vittorio Gallese explains the result as a “unified common intersubjective space” (105, 111), which grounds what Sarah Hrdy calls “emotional modernity”(204-206, 282): the capacities to coordinate with the attention, intention, and emotions of others. Michael Tomasello traces how joint attention and intention develop role reversal and recursive thinking, which allow for collaborative endeavors.

While less cooperativity and more aggression occurred between groups (rather than within them), archeologists Lee Clare et al. find “no conclusive evidence for intergroup fighting in the early Pre-Pottery Neolithic” (10,000–8,800 B.C.E.). They warn of the “‘bellicosification’ of prehistory” (101). Little fossil evidence, Kissel and Kim among others note, can be identified for systemic—rather than episodic—aggression.

A change worth noting amid this pandemic is recorded roughly at 8000 B.C.E. with substantial increases in systemic practices of severe aggression, including endemic warfare, torture, capital punishment, imprisonment, impoverishment, and enslavement between and within groups. The most proximate change in conditions to account for the change in behavior was the advent of agriculture. With the new phenomenon of surpluses—one’s neighbor’s goods as ever-present temptations—came their monopolizability by force. And with that, Robert Bellah explains, came substantial inequalities, hierarchy, and the systemic aggressions noted above. Douglas Fry finds that hierarchical foragers today engage in war while egalitarian ones don’t.

Little good, it seems, comes from swapping what de Waal calls our “evolutionarily advantageous” (589) cooperativity for substantial inequality. It goes against the grain of millennia of human development.

Countries with societally-minded infrastructure more effectively controlled virus spread and distributed economic assistance. A friend and small-business owner in Berlin explained that when she first went on the country’s emergency aid site, she was 147,462^th in line. In two days, she was able to upload her application; 48-hours later, the supplemental aid was in her firm’s account. Germany has a social-market infrastructure, she said. “We funneled the aid right through.”

The U.S. by contrast saw self-interested corruption and structural incapacity born of a weak social service net and long-standing “small government” suspicion of government programming. Unemployment insurance websites crashed and much aid earmarked for small businesses went to large corporations and those with special relationships to banks. The banks earned billions in administrative fees as the funds went through them rather than through a government office.

My favorite tale in these pandemic days is the biblical story of Noah, where the flood waters were not punishment from on high but rather: when the people’s (sexual) wrongdoings so violated the natural world, the world itself responded with fluid eruptions of its own. Insofar as we have ignored the coronavirus when it happens to others, we are getting the world’s response.

New rules of segregation appear with the pandemic. Fear of the other has also strengthened xenophobia and all the usual elements of social exclusion and violence due to social class, gender, age, and ethnic origin—to which has been added a new discrimination: against health workers. We have also seen racism reappear, with theories and policies that continue to assert that it is acceptable to abuse entire human groups for the benefit of privileged minorities—undoubtedly, another way to make scapegoats. This is the up-to-date version of the order: these others must be “crucified and killed” (Acts 2:23).

Nevertheless, life during quarantine is uneven, as thousands of people around the world continue to work for others who must follow the rules of isolation. These people are exposed to the virus since their jobs are necessary and because they frequently live in precarious conditions and lack the basic equipment needed to protect themselves. In Latin America, the pandemic has exposed the deepest poverty of millions of people who work in informal conditions. In addition to this, millions of migrants are left out of the State’s responses, as are hundreds of thousands of people whose miserable living conditions have never been considered by local governments. This occurs in states which have destroyed health services by selling them to private companies whose obvious interest is not health, but profit. The absence of necessary health policies and of an education capable of preventing the pandemic has left the poorest people exposed to insufficient government assistance. Such aid as is given, in turn, falls prey to politicians’ corrupt manipulations.

This pandemic challenges us to learn to live in uncertainty. There are changes that we all already know are taking place and must be continued: matters to do with more investment in public health and basic research. But the question of our way of life remains and requires urgent changes because it is unsustainable for humanity and the planet. We do not know how to live amid the absence of certainty. However, the call to learn from a distance can be healthy, not only in the physical but also in the interpersonal and spiritual sense.

Distance and silence remind us of the hard silence of God in the crucifixion. Not only God Himself has died on the cross. Today we have prayed for all the victims of this pandemic considering them linked to the crucifixion. We have also appreciated the immense compassion and dedication of the healthcare staff who risk their lives on a daily basis with something we don’t yet know how to deal with. And this has invited us to feel with the victims of this disease the same compassionate love that Mary and the other holy women had on the cross.

The silence of God, which has occupied so many pages in treatises on secularization, shows itself now as the healing truth we need. First, it helps us put into perspective the idolatries we have created, inviting us to keep distance from the false models which populate the social networks. Second, it opens us to a necessary critical perspective on the purveyors of fake news; we are the people who are “talking together and discussing” about “all these things.” Maybe we need to learn how remain in silence because “Jesus himself” (Luke 24:15) has already approached and walks beside us.

Finally, this space of distance and silence calls us to get out of atavistic forms of violence, like domestic abuse and exclusion of others—violence which we tend to reproduce in an accelerated way during confinement. We are facing an urgent call for personal, community, and social conversion. The relationships that we maintain within our working groups on mimetic theory and COV&R itself are themselves new spaces that could facilitate and go with this change, which is also a conversion towards a new way of being Christian.

There are other subtler manifestations of this mob, such as the “rona-racism”—ranging from snide remarks to spitting or physical assault—meted out to anyone of Asian appearance as a source of the coronavirus. What has been most striking is where the mob has also begun to turn on medical workers as a source of the coronavirus, with stories emerging of attacks on and denial of retail service to nurses and paramedics. For me, this represented the most remarkable breakdown of external mediation, as the heroes that protect us from the virus have become reframed as its very carriers, sacrificed on an altar of digitally-mediated democratized rage.

If the rage is facilitated by the abstracting effects of conventional and social media, then my hope is for a return to the complexity of encountering the other in real space and time. In particular, I long for a return to an embodied gathering around the table of the Lord so that I can be retrained in my desires, since my desires are as prone as the next person to distortion, subject as they are to this digital bombardment while cooped up in my apartment. As with all those for whom the screen of my laptop is the privileged window to the world beyond my apartment, I need to relearn turning away from a cycle of revenge by a victim against its rivals to a sacramental encounter with the one for whom no rivals exist.