Bulletin 66 – December 2020

At the center of Delcourt’s book is her discussion of reciprocal combat and its relation to communal scapegoating. Having written some six scholarly full-length works prior to this one, Delcourt here gathers the circulating accounts for what she identifies as six themes at play in the story of Oedipus that she separates into distinct chapters: the exposure of infants, the murder of the father, victory over the Sphinx, the riddle of the Sphinx, marriage to the princess, and incest with the mother. Although present commonly in individual sequences elsewhere, these themes are assembled in the myth of Oedipus of course serially and so constitute there, she informs us, something of a “biography” (1). But as the extensions of distinct ritual acts (which is how she understands these stories), they are also from her point of view “interchangeable” and despite their diverse origins “transpose to the realm of fable a particularly rich group of rites . . . all bound up with the idea of kingship” (1). 

As a study of classical philology as well as myth, ritual, and historical studies in the ancient world, Delcourt’s book is inevitably bound to be in conversation with others in the field. As such, her book engages at various points those of Carl Robert, Hermann Usener, Ludwig Deubner, Ludwig Laistner, Saloman Reinach, Georges Dumézil, Martin Nilsson, Sir James Frazer, Henri Jeanmaire, Arnold van Gennep, Ulrich and Tycho Wilamowitz, and others who work in the ancient Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern universe. And to that extent, its current English language publication offers a gateway to scholarly writing no longer as commonly read in this country. 

But it also contains some surprising insights perhaps even less anticipated by its current audience. Following an extended introduction that considers sources or origins that are ritual, historical, or naturalistic, the book is divided into primarily six chapters for the six distinct themes she finds uniquely assembled in Sophocles’ play. Following these seven documents, she conducts a discussion of “endings,” of “myths and memory,” and adds four appendices, some addenda, extended notes and a brief index. This presentation, however is deceptive. The center of gravity is really the second chapter where she engages the murder of the father. Father-son combat is at the center of her concern which is primarily one about kingship and power. 

If we think in terms of Sophocles’ play specifically, that centrality renders other aspects more peripheral. Her book addresses the exposure of the child by Laius and/or Jocasta, the confrontation at Phocis, the encounter with (and vanquishing of) the Sphinx, the riddle posed by the plague-bearing enchantress, marriage with the older wife of the deceased monarch, and the discovery of incestuous connections to that woman (who is also his mother) and her deceased spouse. She is less concerned (at least in this volume) with Delphic oracles, or the ongoing life of the city (which is the interest of the Chorus of Elders), with the story of the pitying and rescuing Theban shepherd or the opportunistic Corinthian Herdsman / Messenger (who herd together on Cithaeron), or generally with the ironic circularity of the history Sophocles presents to us, recalling the myth in one circle, and tracing in retrograde fashion (in the progress of the play) that same mythic progress in the other. Let us examine these chapters in more detail. 

Introduction to the Sources 

Delcourt makes in effect, in her introduction, two points. The first is that legendary accounts are related to specific ritual practices and not, as some scholars maintain, to natural or historical causes, or human versions of minor divinities. The person is the product of the act, she maintains, not the reverse. “Oedipus is neither a historical figure nor an anciently humanized minor god. He is the very type of all heroes of essentially—if not uniquely—ritual origin, whose acts are prior to their person” (8). 

Then, having rejected these origins, she turns to “the sources of our knowledge of the Oedipus legend” (8). Apart from brief references in Homer and Hesiod, the most complete sources—the epic cycles of the sixth century—are entirely lost. Apart from Sophocles, two tragic dramatists treat a portion of the myth: Aeschylus in Seven against Thebes, and Euripides in Phoenician Women. Aeschylus’ play, she says, seems to have been the third part of a trilogy preceded by a Laius and an Oedipus (now lost) that seem to have followed the course of an inherited curse developed on the model of the Oresteia rather than the Sophoclean structure of ironic discovery. And Euripides’ play seems also to have been similarly one of three plays in which there was a Laius and a Chrysippus (detailing Laius’ involvement with the young man that occasioned his father Pelops’ curse with which the story of Oedipus begins), but those plays too seem to have been lost except for a few lines. The story available in Aeschylus and Euripides, thus, is not for the most part the portion of the myth that Sophocles treats and may even have derived from sources other than the ones Sophocles used. At one point in the codices of the extant Euripides drama, a scholion gives some thirty lines associated with the name “Pisander,” and this account, though inconsistent at points, has tantalized scholars for years, although, Delcourt concludes, she is “inclined to ascribe an epic origin to the Pisander scholion” (14). 

Exposure of the Infant 

The first formal chapter of Delcourt’s investigation examines the extent to which the theme of the exposure of infants reflects, in origin, multiple ritual acts. Oedipus is undoubtedly exposed on the mountainside as “one of those malefic newborn children whom ancient communities did away with because their deformity was proof of divine wrath” (17). But it would be a “mistake” in her view to limit that scene to rituals that punished “evil” children in a procedure intended to ward off barrenness. Other similar themes involving the rearing of children on a mountain and the submersion of children within a chest in the water—themes reflecting the initiation of a young man into full adulthood—appear also to have been a model. And much of her long first chapter is spent recounting variants on these themes and this ritual origin. She notes for example, that there is another circulating account of Oedipus in which Oedipus is placed into a chest, cast into the sea, and washes up at Sicyon or Corinth (36). 

But then suddenly she draws a parallel to the pharmakos ritual and wonders to what extent that connection is instructive. “Exposed infants made to undergo the trial of the chest and deformed infants who were excommunicated as portents of evil were both treated in a way that in many respects resembles the fate of the adult pharmakoi” (41). The key to their comparison, she says, is that they are both “scapegoats.” “The act by which a pharmakos was solemnly expelled from the community was intended both to increase the fertility of its land and to ward off evil in the person of one who has been made to bear full weight of the community‟s transgression” (41). 

She had in fact already introduced the idea earlier when she noted (revising her own previously published account) that “the exposed infants were scapegoats” (17). “Their sacralization,” she now adds, “in the event they were rescued, had the effect of bringing about a reversal of values, so that what had been seen as evil was now considered to be good” (17). And she now notes that in both instances the process is one of “sacrifice.” It governs the removal of newborns and it is associated with the removal of the pharmakos (43), in both cases removals that are seen as beneficial to the community, and when rescued that are considered sacred figures for whom the persecutors are to be blamed. 

Murder of the Father 

But it is in the second chapter that the heart of her book is exhibited: combat, death of the defeated competitor, the old giving way to the young, the daughter of the old as a reward for victory, the ultimate reward as power. What is at stake, she asks, “with regard to the theme of old and new kings in Greek legend?” First¸“what is at stake in the conflict between generations is always the conquest of power.” Second, she says, the “central episode [of that conflict] is a combat or a race, at the end of which the defeated competitor must die.” Third, “the old man is always vanquished” with few exceptions. Fourth, “the two rivals are sometimes father and son, but more often an old man and a young man who is in love with the old man’s daughter.” Fifth, “the ritual nucleus of the myth entitles the victor to wield power.” “This same rite,” she notes, “was the source of sporting competitions in ancient Greece” (102). 

We recognize of course this conflict as a drama commonly identified by more recent commentators at the center of comedic genre (think of Molière) and as often traced by other more anthropologically inclined commentators to rituals echoing seasonal change, rituals not entirely remote from the initiation rituals by which she explains so much else in this book. Interestingly, Delcourt here declines that explanation and identifies “the conflict between Oedipus and Laius” as “a mythic transposition of the rite that Frazer unforgettably described in connection with the priest at Nemi who had to be killed by his successor” (78-79). “Let us call this the struggle between a young king and an old king,” she writes, although at the same time, she notes “the rite of succession by murder appears to have totally disappeared in Greece in historical times” (79). 

Victory over the Sphinx 

Turning then to the battle with the Sphinx, with regard to the “origin of the legendary themes we have isolated” she says we can identify some “firm conclusions.” The “monstrous adversary, like that of placing a child in a chest, consists of several superimposed layers of meaning.” The Sphinx is in the first place an “incubus.” Moreover, the “demon is at the same time a tormented soul.” And regarding her battle with Oedipus, she writes, “it preserves an ancient memory of trials of initiation, in the first place those rites of passage that every adolescent must undergo; but above all those more terrible ordeals to which future leaders must submit.” “While we know a bit about the first kind, we know almost nothing about the second,” she observes. 

And mindful perhaps that such kingship rituals have, as she said earlier, disappeared from Greece, she concludes with the goal which could apply to each of the thematic episodes she discusses in this book. “One would like to be able to write down next to each of them an exhaustive list, the one enumerating the archaic religious practices to which people were long faithful, the other the legends to which these rites were transposed when they began to fade from people’s minds” (133-134). 

The Riddle 

In turning to the riddle, Delcourt continues the same line of thinking: rites of initiation. “It may be that the riddle myth originated in a belief in oppressive and infernal demons. But it could never have developed into anything more than that if it had not been used as an instrument of propaganda in support of initiations—religious initiations to begin with, social initiations later.” The riddle in her view is a defense of ritual initiations. “[A] vindicatory purpose is obvious. It is detected in many later tales as well…. One relates a story in order to demonstrate something, in order to persuade someone.” And in this case what must be granted is entrance into adulthood, the riddle in her view being a kind of password or a shibboleth. “The theme of the riddle demonstrates that a novice will become rich once the habit of scrupulous obedience enables him to correctly repeat everything his master has taught him” (144). 

Marriage to a Princess 

Marriage to a princess may be the hardest thematic “sell” about which Delcourt would like to persuade us, at least in context of Sophocles’ play, where Jocasta is an older woman and Oedipus is not Lancelot fighting a fatherly King Arthur for the hand of lovely Guinevere, or, in the Greek context, Jason struggling with the monstrous Medea for the hand of Creon’s daughter Glauce. “Beneath the theme of marriage to a princess,” Delcourt writes, “two known rites may be distinguished: nuptial trials and springtime sacred marriages, and beneath these rites themselves simpler beliefs in the immediate efficacy of the race and circumambulation” (212). But the theme of marriage, she concedes, “seldom appears alone, nearly always being accompanied by the theme of generational conflict” (212). And so this theme, although distinct, may be bound up with both the preceding sequence—depicting combat with a monster—and other battles of which each of these six episodes are transformations. 

Incest with the Mother

Despite earlier legends in which the new king continues to rule until his death, that is not the case in which Sophocles’ Oedipus concludes. “Oedipus’s incest,” she writes, “leads back from a clear romantic legend to the shadowy world in which myths are elaborated, the penumbra of immediately efficacious rites” (196). But what rites? What practices? “Sacred marriage with the earth,” she suggests (200). To our own ears, in the age of increased respect for psychoanalytic thinking and structural anthropology—think of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s identification of the incest taboo, for example, at the structural origin of the possibility of distinguishing nature from culture—such a thesis sounds less compelling. And Delcourt readily admits that “the conjectures…sketched in this chapter are…tenuous” (202) although she finds in such discussions ways of accounting for such common motifs in mythopoetic works as kissing the ground or potential origins for other myths—like those of Poseidon and Demeter, for example. “The shipwrecked man kisses the ground when he finally comes ashore,” she writes. “Both Odysseus and Agamemnon kiss the ground on returning to their native lands. I believe that in the beginning this was not merely an expression of affection and gratitude but also of sexual union—which is to say an act of possession” (196). And in this way, she asserts, the relation to the earth is linked to concerns with dominance for the tyrant: to rule the earth by lying prostrate upon it or to be ruled by the earth by lying six feet beneath it. 

Endings, Myths, and Memory 

The book that Marie Delcourt writes is not philosophic. Nor is it an analysis of Sophocles’ play. It is an assemblage of the wide variety of legends she sees as the product of ritual practices and mythic thinking from which the drama, the epic, and other ancient mythopoetic works were drawn. 

And the final two documents before the four appendices, extensive notes, brief addenda, and an index, could well appear like stray commentaries the author might have included in an earlier chapter. “Endings,” for example, which examines changing perspectives of the deaths of Jocasta and Oedipus, fits the bill. But “Myths and Memory” does not and might have served as something like the author’s Conclusion (opposite the Introduction at the other end) had she been availed of the opportunity to work more on the book. It sums up concisely what she has been arguing throughout. 

The essay is divided into three parts. The first examines the prehistory of myths and their transformation.

A myth is modified because its original motivation is no longer understood and comes to be replaced by a new one. The myth’s new purpose acts in turn upon the manner of its telling and reshapes it. Thus the Theban legend, hostile to the family in its primitive form, was subsequently reworked to accommodate a familial morality. Aeschylus’ Oedipus ceased to be the conqueror that he was for Homer and Hesiod and was made instead into a criminal; indeed, so acutely is Oedipus aware of his crime in Aeschylus that he punishes himself, which he could do only by stripping himself of the rewards to his conquest. This shift in ethical point of view turns the denouement inside out, so that the story concludes with an abdication—the most typical ending of all the legends of conquerors (213-214). 

The second part concerns individual and historical memory. Delcourt contrasts her view with Arnold van Gennep’s that “legends tenaciously preserve the memory of outmoded institutions” (214), asserting that legends to the contrary “constantly modernize themselves by reconciling in one way or another with the state of society at the time of their latest recounting” (215). 

The third and final section concerns psychoanalysis which, she says, takes one legend regarding familial rivalry and sexual union and generalizes it. “No one would dream of denying the reality of father-son rivalry,” she concludes. But “it has its source, I believe, much more in a will to power than in sexual desire proper, what Freud calls the libido. It is this will that gives all the legends of conflict between an old king and a young pretender a distinctive mood and atmosphere, no matter how the adventure ends” (219). 

Detailing at length as this book does the rites of initiation and battles for succession of kingship at their origins, the legends of conquerors transformed in ancient Greece into familial dramas from epic to tragic mythopoesis, and zeroing in as this book does on the combative and yet sacrificial nature of this material in each installment—its relation at once to scapegoating and exclusionary behavior that can also act as “sacralization”—the potential interest in Delcourt’s book for this audience is hard to gainsay. Following “the war to end all wars,” this Allied partisan and feminist activist surveys some hundreds of classical legends tracing them to several distinct ritual practices in which the sacrificial behaviors at the heart of the myths and the personalities that arose from these behaviors always turned upon one contest in particular: namely, the contest of young and old males for royal succession; the reciprocal combat for kingship, rule, and power in which the defeat of a monster and marriage to a princess was the expected outcome and reward. That the future adventures of the conqueror turned out badly in all instances in the case of Oedipus, that the man he defeated and succeeded turned out to be his father and the woman he wedded and bedded his mother, reflects in her view the transposition of the legends into new circumstances, the changing ways the epic and tragic poets saw their mythopoetic tasks, as the unfortunate future of an Odyssean adventurer in Homer and Hesiod, of an inherited curse in Aeschylus, of a forbidden passion in Euripides, of an ironic lesson in the power of the gods in human affairs in Sophocles—all perspectives, if we are to trust our author, of a burgeoning familial morality that is displacing more archaic social structures in the ancient universe. 

Colin’s pursuit of Margot comes at the expense not only of his devoted high school girlfriend, but also of the most appealing character in the book, Julia. Her unveiled attraction toward Colin naturally dampens her appeal in his eyes, a mistake that becomes apparent only subsequent to his downfall. Julia is the only character with a defined religious affiliation (Catholic), which downgrades her sophistication in Colin’s eyes. She lapses over the course of the year, but not before Colin goes to mass with her. In this scene the prose speeds up a beat, and our hero prays for the first time, “Please God make me like a little child” (76). The prayer—emblematic of Ignatius’s “consolation without cause” described in the Spiritual Exercises—seems contrary to every other desire Colin has about entering what he imagines to be the adult world of casual sex and sophisticated literary analysis. Colin returns to mass a few more times, but this is not a novel about conversion.

The other religious space of the novel is the seminar room. In the spring semester Colin gains admittance into the coveted seminar of Professor McClatchy, the novel’s guru. Rex, the precocious and intellectually advanced one in their circle, suffers the sting of exclusion, and his shadow shrinks. Margot and Julia also gain admittance, and the seminar becomes a magnified hothouse of desire. Colin eventually begins what will prove to be his downfall: a commitment-free sexual relationship with a beautiful woman, Margot. His heart, perhaps made child-like or more human by his prayer, desires a commitment that puts him in a double-bind of his own making. He has a desire that he desires he did not have. This bind launches a pathetic, losing, Seinfeld-like battle to appear the one without desire. He is no match for Margot.

Disciples of Girard are among almost the last group of critics who allow themselves to ask how much of a novel is autobiographical. Eventually Colin’s downfall leads him to seek the advice of Professor McClatchy. The advice given to Colin seems like the most likely autobiographical scene. The professor recommends an ascetic path involving self-denial. This path includes drawing still-life sketches, a practice that “will force you to see what’s really there” (207). Seeing what’s there is hardest when we have no way to hold up a mirror to ourselves. Augustine, the West’s first autobiographer, knew this when he declared, “I am a mystery to myself.” 

Colin’s journey toward self-discovery is portended in the book’s opening quotation: “Humiliation is the way to humility.” His attempts at fiction, the professor notes, are marred by “an unmistakable current of self-hatred.” Buoyed by this revelation, the scales fall from Colin’s eyes and he begins to exit the masochistic, obsessive concern about the image he projects, all the way down to the ill-fitting leather jacket that he sheds in the final scenes. He feels the joy of life that recalls his childhood, and in this moment wonders whether his earnest prayer at mass has been answered. 

Minor Indignities provides a lot to chew on, in digestible bites. The first-person perspective inhibits the capacity to make the other characters come fully alive, but they are still rendered sympathetically. The novel is fun and realistic, even as it exaggerates the absurdities of college life. The reader roots for the hero, even when she or he cringes at his many missteps. I recommend it highly.

Fundamental to London’s methodology is demonstrating the need for the reader to be personally involved with all of the characters in the two chapters of John under examination. Some characters are easier to identify with than others, which is a way of saying that identifying with some characters fosters more self-flattery than others. The man born blind is the most attractive because he comes so far in gaining perspicacity as he arrives at a vital faith in Jesus, and also because of his wit and chutzpah when examined by the Jewish leaders. On the other hand, the disciples, with whom London starts, seem judgmental in asking if it were the man’s own sin or the sins of his parents that caused his blindness. Least attractive to most readers are the Jewish leaders who seem to be the bad guys in their harsh judgmentalism of both the man born blind and Jesus who healed him.

However, London ably shows how John turns the tables on such snap judgments. Seeing ourselves mirrored in the disciples and/or the Jewish leaders, for example, is not flattering, but the truth is that many of us instinctively react to the problem of evil and its chaotic consequences by discerning who is to blame as a means of regaining clarity. Most instinctive is the tendency to blame the victim, which both the disciples and the Jewish leaders do. On the other hand, identifying with the formerly blind man when he “wins” the debate and confounds the supposedly wise Jewish leaders makes us feel good, but London shows a darker side to the formerly blind man’s humor, as John shows it to be seriously hurtful. Here, London points out that the Jewish leaders do not show fierce anger at the formerly blind man until they have been put down so decisively. 

Identifying with the characters by picking and choosing pits us against one set of characters or another and so engages us in the conflict within the narrative. Such reading has spread out into lived experience with tragic results over two millennia in the form of persecution of the Jews. We experience, in miniature, the conflictual relationships that lead to scapegoating behavior as outlined by Girard. London, however, shows that identifying with all the characters through the way Jesus treats all of them leads us to a conciliatory place. First, London notes that Jesus exposes the truth of our own blindness, especially the accusatory blindness of blaming the victim. This is true both for the disciples and for the Jewish leaders, which makes it just as true for each of us as well. Jesus is not blaming them, or us; Jesus is showing the truth, which we can accept or deny. Unfortunately, we accept such correction as accusatory when it should be enlightening. Second, Jesus continues the conversation with the Jewish leaders even when they respond with rejection of what Jesus is showing them. Far from being a whole new episode, the next chapter of John is a continuation of the conversation carried on in chapter nine. Jesus is seeking a deeper unity in which the disciples, the man born blind, and the Jewish leaders are all upheld.

The symbols change in chapter 10. We have the good shepherd, the sheep, the thieves and bandits, and the wolves. Identifying with the sheep and hating the evil wolves becomes a new favorite blood sport for the reader. But London shows that John turns the tables in this chapter precisely as he did before. I especially appreciate London’s insight that the wolves, the most violent victimizers in the chapter, are the ones hurting the most; they are actually helpless sheep in wolves’ clothing. This move sets up John’s Christological interpretation of the Good Shepherd. Here, the disciples, the formerly blind man, the Jewish leaders, the sheep, the bandits and the wolves gather together and focus the blame for the world’s evils on the Good Shepherd who absorbs the collective violence in laying down his life for the sheep before taking his life up again in the Resurrection. It might come as a shock that the “good” guys have turned out to be “bad” guys along with the supposedly “real” bad guys, but London has shown us that all of the characters have shown scapegoating characteristics in their mutual accusations. In response, Jesus has chosen to absorb all of the accusations into his person in an embrace of all characters who have all become simultaneously sheep and wolves. Again, his revealing the truth of their scapegoating behavior is not condemnatory but rather a move to deliver them, and us, of our scapegoating tendencies.

We can see then, how these two chapters tell, in miniature and through symbolism, the story of the Gospel as a whole. As I mentioned earlier, there are also individual verses that are carefully analyzed for how they encapsulate the issues in what we could call a miniaturization of the miniature. Jesus’ response to the disciples’ initial question as to who is to blame for the man’s blindness (Jn. 9: 3) is particularly important. Everything hinges on how we interpret and translate the conjunction all. If we connect the conjunction to what precedes it, we get a sense that the man was born blind so that God’s work might be revealed. I admit I have been troubled myself over this notion as it seems to make the man’s blindness a means for some purpose of God. London (and some of the scholars he consults) seem also to be so troubled. London sides with the interpretation that connects the link, via the preposition hina, with what follows rather than what precedes it. This approach places the emphasis on the fact that the man was born blind (without attaching blame anywhere) which creates the need to respond. This interpretation brings us to the mystery of God responding to suffering, not with explanation, but with a dynamic presence and embrace. That is the response London showed us in the insights of St. Augustine, Julian Norwich, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and C. S. Lewis at the beginning of the book. 

One does not have to be interested in Girard to benefit from London’s contribution to Johannine studies, although anyone interested in applying Girard to biblical studies will profit from reading this book. Most importantly, pastors and laypersons will also find this book of pastoral value, both for Bible study and for helping fellow Christians deal with questions concerning theodicy. Even the detailed discussions of small points of Greek grammar and syntax are clearly presented so that one does not need to be a scholar to understand and benefit from them. Strongly recommended.

Two: domestication can happen intentionally or just randomly in nature. Humans have domesticated foxes in quick succession by breeding only ones with reduced reactive aggression, resulting in a domestication syndrome. The same seems to have happened slowly, with increasing intentionality over time, in the domestication of wolves into dogs. (This perhaps first began with the natural selection of wolves who were least aggravated by getting near humans to eat their camp detritus.) But domestication can also happen outside the human sphere, as in bonobos, who are basically a domesticated cousin of chimpanzees—evidenced not only in their reduced aggression but in their own domestication syndrome. This happened, he argues, largely through contingent, niche ecological features related to landscape, food-options, competition, etc. 

Three: it has long been asked whether humans are a “domesticated” species or if that is just anthropocentrism. If so, who domesticated us? The old fashioned answer was that God made us—so, that’s that. But asked in the scientific framework? One early anthropologist posed that perhaps some now-extinct super-species domesticated us. Wrangham’s answer is basically that we unintentionally domesticated ourselves by persistently killing off aggressive individuals. This has resulted in Homo sapiens being a domesticated version of Homo neanderthalensis, erectus, etc. Girard’s not unrelated answer is that religion domesticated us. By religion he means an integrated pattern of chaotic/exceptional and ordered/normal behaviors that contain violence, mediated through an increasing mimetic capacity: chaotic mimetic violence restrained and channeled through mimetic ritual, taboo, and myth. This created a feedback loop that exercised and intensified our mimetic capacity while protecting against its dangerous excess. Whatever the case, compared with our (putatively more violent) hominin cousins, the human phenotype shows strong signs of a domestication syndrome: reduced cranium and jaw sizes, smaller skeleton mass, and evidently decreased reactive aggression.

Fourth, and finally: Wrangham argues this domestication is related to a long, pre-human arc of transition, throughout the mid-Pleistocene, from older alpha-dominance patterns to tyrannies of egalitarian patriarchy. Wrangham draws upon hunter-gatherer studies to suggest how this new pattern, characteristic of sapiens’ legacy, is one of group-policing, humbling any who exalt themselves. This includes cases of criticizing and chastising anyone who assertively portends alpha despotism, and not daring to brag about having killed big game, lest one get cast down as a paternal danger. The same goes for insulting and shaming gift-givers, lest they grow haughty. Those who violated these dynamics and disturbed the peace must have been the ones with greater genetic dispositions toward reactive aggression (i.e. bullies, alphas, hot-heads). They would be less likely to propagate their genes due to a selective pressure: “proactive coalitionary killing.” The development of language turbo-charged this habit with the ability to agitate, gossip, and scheme for their removal. The power of this selection process, he asserts, explains the origins of everything from blushing to morality. 

Such group killings, in the earliest phases, were likely more directed toward outsiders, but they became increasingly applied toward internal group dynamics. In any case, whether in raids and skirmishes with outsiders, or intragroup executions of antisocial members, they are all characterized by generally being low-risk to the attackers and even enjoying neural pleasure rewards. This selected habit is shared somewhat by our chimp cousins, in their periodic group killings. At the same time, the pattern of group-policing is mirrored in our bonobo cousins, wherein females keep a stringent check on alpha-male-ing. 

Lest we think Wrangham a Hobbesian champion of violence, he is diligent to denounce any whiffs of “biological determinism,” as if it legitimizes group violence or capital punishment to observe their adaptive roles. He spends chapters denouncing the facile and politically-misguided anthropological spasms that, in presuming that we must take commands from nature (i.e. conflating “natural” things with “morally good things”), seek to prove that nature is Rousseauian and pacifically cooperative. To the contrary, he touts a conventional, modern, liberal defense of the value of nonviolence, laws, and diplomatic norms, and the backwardness of capital punishment. And he does well to insist that any optimistic talk of cooperation must include the reality of our cooperative violence, keeping a critical eye toward our dark side. The theologically inclined Girardian is likewise prepared to treat the seemingly pessimistic doctrine of original sin as optimistic: the doctrine asserts there is nothing necessarily moral or “natural” about nature and natural selection. The doctrine helps us distinguish how the evil, violence, and lying that seem so habituated in us need not be seen as ordained fate but, instead, a contingent mistake in our evolutionary trajectory. Thus Christianity emphasizes mercy and grace just as it unearths the long, dark roots of human sin. Darker accounts of our hominin ancestors don’t validate the violence, but rather, “wherever sin abounds, let grace increase.”

In my appraisal, as one inclined toward mimetic theory, Wrangham’s account is intriguing, filling in all sorts of conceptual and empirical holes, especially ones left open by Girard about hunter-gatherers. But it also begs for a mimetic supplement. First, Wrangham utters not a word about imitation, and this isn’t just a Girardian complaint. A large, diverse set of anthropologists eight years ago published a set of essays trying to corral an anthropological field consensus about human uniqueness: it more or less centered upon our outstanding joint attention, other-attention, and “concern for the minds of others” (Calcagno and Fuentes, eds., “What Makes Us Human?”). 

Lacking that mimetic dynamic, Wrangham’s theory may too rigidly force us to view early human group violence through the limited lens of killing aggressors. But what if archaeology somehow unearthed a much more chaotic and meaningless record of human targets? We need to be able to account for the numerous killings of non-alpha figures in our bloody catalogue. Also, with Wrangham lacking a mimetic dimension, he too strongly emphasizes proactive aggression as a self-explanatory behavior, undertheorizing the inter-group imitative dynamics that undergird such aggression and killings. For example, it has been thickly demonstrated in mimetic studies that the lack of an external scapegoat coincides with increased intra-group violence, just as adequate external targets coincides with increased internal docility. At issue here is not aggression dynamics but imitative dynamics. Put differently, Wrangham states that perhaps our bigger brains facilitated the language and plotting conducive to proactive killings; but mimetic theory tries to answer the prior question: whence the bigger brain? 

Mimetic theory and Wrangham seem to partially agree with Nietzsche that the human species “requires” (rather, adaptively benefitted from) “human sacrifice” (a metonymy suitable for proactive coalitionary killing or the scapegoat mechanism). But mimetic theory adds a nuance of siding against Nietzsche, with Christ, by saying that our spurious lynching habit has been arbitrarily targeting all sorts of folks—too big, too small, too pretty, too ugly, just in the wrong place at the wrong time, etc. Early humans weren’t just getting rid of aggressive riff-raff; we were mindlessly converging upon whoever stuck out. And this habit has not merely selected out the relatively more aggressive member-genes; but it has selected for a dangerous mimetic blindness in our violence and mental perception. That is, when Wrangham places his emphasis on the selecting out of reactive aggression, I think he doesn’t sufficiently theorize the selecting for “proactive coalitionary killing,” nor, as an adjacent point, how this practice cannot be considered a reliable detector of aggressors. (One calls to mind the numerous lies surrounding lynchings in the U.S., let alone around the world.) Wrangham lists cases of groups—whether hunter gatherers or settlers—where the target is evidently some irascible individual. And thus the pseudo-rationality of their killing, for Wrangham, is described as an execution, a term almost connoting relative cogency. But, mimetic theory is more inclined to use words like lynching and mob. It emphasizes how misapprehension and delusion were selected insofar as they were adaptive via coalitionary killing. For Girard, the scapegoat mechanism is “a protective misapprehension.” Wrangham, I suppose, begins to approximate this in discussing the “positive illusions” that accompany the group-war spirit, animating it with a winning, adaptive confidence. (The “usefulness” of this coalitionary confidence turns into mass blunder when scaled up from tribes to large-scale wars.)

One might reasonably synthesize the theories and suggest that it was individuals with the greatest levels of reactive aggression who made themselves the easiest targets for lynch mobs. This would add to mimetic theory an insight and distinction about aggression foreign to its lexicon: that the scapegoat mechanism, often mediated via proactive coalitionary aggression, may have spawned an unintended byproduct of genetically selecting out certain sapiens more disposed toward reactive aggression. Meanwhile, Wrangham’s hypothesis could integrate without friction, I think, a psychological dimension of imitation, supplementing his aggression-centrism, and ready his theory to integrate the randomness of lynching phenomena. I have in mind one immense oddity: why did aggressive egalitarians eventually spawn the practice of elevating divine kings? This phenomenon is explainable through the scapegoat mechanism transfiguring human sacrifices into celebrities. And, perhaps Wrangham’s most easily fillable lacuna, he utters not a word about the evidently ubiquitous practice of sacrifice and ritual violence—which I infer is a more ordinary human habit than extraordinary collective killing. Such practices, catalogue-able as imitative variants on proactive coalitionary killings, fits like a hand in glove. Konner, too, suggests that other factors, like females selecting the least aggressive mates, are perfectly reasonable, and perhaps more steady, selective pressures to consider here.

We can conclude with a general distinction between Girard and Wrangham. Wrangham is focused on how sapiens’ relative docility emerged and how its reactive aggression was reduced through groups killing off the outstandingly aggressive. Among his minor flaws is his under-theorizing how this involves selection for proactive coalitionary killing. Girard, by contrast, explicitly said his theory is not about aggression and is focused on the selection of our mimetic capacity channeled through the protective misapprehension of mimetic, sacrificial culture. Granted, intensified mimesis can imply intensified contagious violence; and thus the theorists eventually converge at points. But I think we enjoy a more immense horizon of psychological creativity, nuance, and hope by emphasizing how our charge is not merely to further reduce sapiens’ proactive and reactive aggression, but learning how to imitate well, learning how to reject autonomous notions of the self and peacefully receive our subjectivity from the divine Other who is love. All this is to stray far off the Wrangham radar. But I insist that it is all interconnected.

Yet many if not all of the components that make up the “social suite” find strong resonance in mimetic theory. Here they are:

1. The capacity to have and recognize individual identity
2. Love for partners and offspring
3. Friendship
4. Social networks
5. Cooperation
6. Preference for one’s own group (that is, “in-group bias”)
7. Mild hierarchy (that is, relative egalitarianism)
8. Social learning and teaching (13).

Items 2 through 5 and 8 all have much to do with positive, that is, non-conflictual mimesis, the kind that Andrew Meltzoff and others have shown to be essential for the bonding between parent and child and thus foundational for all other relationships, and that Marcia Pally and others have begun to integrate with research on human development, both ontogenetic and phylogenetic, by Michael Tomasello and others. 

Item 6, in-group bias, is how social psychology recognizes at a more constructive, less violent level the same relational dynamic that mimetic theory finds to be not only more violent but more generative as the scapegoat mechanism. Similarly, item 7, not only asserts the value of some amount of hierarchy for providing models to learn from but also could be seen to recognize its importance for inhibiting rivalry, as Girard explains through the distinction between external and internal mediation. In external mediation, when one’s model of desire is hierarchically superior, they can serve as a means of learning with minimal risk of direct competition and thus violence. But what keeps the model close enough without becoming too close? And how does in-group bias maintain community without becoming mob violence or war? What Christakis presents in items 6 and 7 as stable, universal equilibria are seen in mimetic theory more as perilous balances—between total unanimity and violent scapegoating and between complete egalitarianism and severe hierarchy—that are in need of further explanation.

Listing individual identity first implies it to be a foundation for the rest, in keeping with the idea that we each carry the blueprint for a good society in our genes. But the evidence given in the rest of the book seems equally susceptible of the view that individuality emerges from the other items on the list. For mimetic theory, individuality is not just a given, but a remarkable product of normal human development that constantly risks losing itself in less benign aspects of the social suite and, conversely, finds its fulfillment in love that elevates preferential affection to something more inclusive and universal. Thus cooperative individuality is not separate from but entwined with competitive individuality. 

An emphasis on the importance of individual identity might also explain why Christakis does not consider the importance of imitation, since individuality and imitation are commonly seen as opposites. But if individuality is an emergent feature of our relational nature, what Girard calls interdividuality, then there is all the more reason to see mimetic capacity as the basis of the social suite, and thus to see Christakis’s approach as deeply compatible with mimetic theory. (See Chris Haw’s similar argument in his review of Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox in this issue.)

Christakis makes his case by assembling an extraordinary range of evidence: not just sociological studies of diverse cultures, especially some considered outliers to claims of universality; but also “unintentional communities,” such as shipwreck survivors; “intentional communities,” such as utopian communes and researchers isolated over the winter at the south pole; and “artificial communities” set up online, one of his lab’s specialties. Most fascinating to me were the chapters on animal mating and friendship—both human-animal friendship and, especially, friendship among primates, elephants, and cetaceans. The long evolutionary story in view here is how “pair-bonding and joint child-rearing,” seen more widely in mammals, “set the stage for cooperation and friendship with unrelated individuals” and have a genetic basis (198).

All of these communities are notably peaceful, except for some shipwrecked groups that lacked good leadership. Christakis recognizes the problem of human violence, of course, but treats it as separate, “a parallel propensity for animosity and violence” (49). Thus he tends, like most, to locate the cause of violence in difference and the solution in seeing our “common humanity” as powerfully witnessed in the universality of the social suite. Yet the mimetic insight that our “competitive and cooperative impulses” (418) are not separate but have a common source in our capacity for imitation would only add to the practical value of his argument. His work on artificial communities, for instance, leads him to assert the malleability of traits like kindness, but the nature of the experiments allows him to attribute this only to the rules governing the social structure in which people are embedded and tends to assume something like a rational-actor model of human motivation based on reward. Likewise, his discussion elsewhere of social learning and the importance of leadership does not include modelling things like kindness or what to desire.

Christakis speculates that we might be “in the middle of a long-timescale transition to becoming a species that feels attachment to ever larger numbers of people” (134), a wonderfully optimistic thought. Mimetic theory has focused its explanations of the rise of communities organized by something other than ritualized and regulated violence and of ideas like universal human rights on historical factors, especially the advent of the major world religions. Yet one of the frontiers of mimetic theory is linking this historical view with the longer perspective that violence may be as old as Cain but not as old as Adam. Blueprint can help us think about what is as old as Adam, and even older, that remains essential to peaceful communities, such as play. How, for instance, does the orientation toward friendship that we share with elephants and orcas point us toward an ideal of universal love of neighbor and laying down one’s life for one’s friends?