Revisiting Rene Girard: _I See Satan Fall Like Lightning_

 A while back I tried reading Rene Girard's Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World and gave up. Now I'm attempting his later, shorter book titled I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. It promises to be an exploration of the victim concept in Western culture, and at some point will tackle political correctness. The basic premise is that Christianity flipped the script on the age-old ritual of scapegoating and communal violence, putting the emphasis not on the community purified by the removal of the enemy, nor even on the heroism of the divine sacrifice, but on the wrongness of crucifying Him. I'm about a third of the way in, and he's still mostly talking about "mimetic rivalry."

I was not sold on the mimetic basis of rivalry when I first read Girard. But this book makes a key point: Humans envy each other no matter how wealthy their society is. If our envy were based on desires that didn't derive from social cues, anyone with more food than a baseline caveman would be happy. But we desire new things and more things because we see what those around us have and how much they enjoy it.

One other key point: In chapter 4 he talks about a pagan society killing a beggar to end a plague. Contemporary historians considered the claim credible. Now, obviously killing a guy already in the town will not stop an epidemic. If he were the initial carrier and killed by arrows from a distance before entering the city, OK, that might save the town. But he was in town. No way killing him could stop a microbe.

What Girard says is that plagues led to social disorder, and so social disorder was sometimes interpreted as a plague. One might note an analogy with the social contagion of mass hysteria even in the modern world. So if historians note lots of people suffering mass hysteria, and perhaps even getting physical maladies from the disruption of life, the breakdown of services and supplies, etc., well, anything that restores order could indeed end the epidemic.

Girard writes on page 52:

Until the Renaissance, whenever "real" epidemics occurred they disrupted social relations.

Alas, he wrote this book in 1999, and died in 2015. He never experienced 2020.

Some have joked that Russia's invasion of Ukraine ended COVID. Now, on one level that's absurd: COVID was and is still spreading, albeit not with the same severity after a few years of both vaccine-acquired and naturally-acquired immunity. And early 2022 corresponded with the tail of the first Omicron wave that gave COVID to damn near everyone who had not already gotten it. On another level, Ukraine certainly diverted a lot of attention from COVID. A certain kind of Westerner had a new foe to oppose and a new victim* to support. I think I know what Girard would say to that.

*I characterize Ukraine this way not to critique them as weak but to simply recognize that they were the targets of unprovoked aggression. Their response has been heroic.

Latest Read: The Stolen Year by Anya Kamenetz

I haven't had much of a blogging urge for a while, but I want to get a couple of thoughts out there about my latest read, so I can remember them. I'm reading The Stolen Year by Anya Kamenetz, a book on the damage done to kids by moving school online during COVID. It's a 300 page popular book with a certain font and layout, so I thought I would find it unremarkable. But in chapter 1 I'm hooked. She goes into the history of education in America, even as far back as Colonial times, which is not something I'd expect in this genre.

I like three points in particular:

1) Americans like the idea of education as "fixing" people once and for all, so they never need fixing again. We'll educate them and then poverty is fixed. We'll educate them and then they're virtuous people. We'll educate them and then they're whatever it is that we need them to be so we can believe that some perennial problem is solved. 

It's largely folly, but it's what we believe in this culture. Liberals believe it because it means that a social service (allegedly) fixed some problem. Conservatives believe it because they've taught a man to fish and now he (allegedly) never needs feeding again.

I've heard this critique of the culture before, but I've only heard it from a few people. But Kamenetz is one of those wise few. That makes her stand out among writers on education. I need to pay attention to her.

2) It is hence unsurprising that in a country with far less of a safety net than peer countries of similar wealth and cultural heritage, education would be one of the few universal guarantees. We guarantee public education to rich and poor. We guarantee it to the disabled. We guarantee it to teenagers in jail, apparently. (This was news to me, but she's an NPR reporter focused on education, so I presume she's looked into this.) We might not guarantee everyone a great education, but it's the one service we guarantee in some form.

This is part of why schools are the main anti-hunger program in the country. We feed poor kids...via school. We might not feed them anything terribly healthy, but this is how we feed them.

She makes the interesting point that the commitment runs so deep that even profoundly disabled kids who will never gain the ability to communicate much are still guaranteed special education. I confess that I had often privately thought that this was a bit much, a well-meaning but inefficient way of meeting needs that aren't really amenable to school intervention. I've known a few kids in that situation, I understand why it's done, I even feel good for them. But part of me always wondered if it's really necessary to address their needs this way instead of some other route.

But Kamenetz makes the interesting point that this is a marker of our dedication to this universal guarantee. If we didn't go there, if we eroded the guarantee for them, we could erode it for more people. And soon we'd erode it for people who have needs that really are best met via school. I can respect that point.

It's strange that an anti-intellectual country like ours would be so committed to schools. Indeed, maybe having an anti-intellectual culture value schools in all the wrong ways just exacerbates our educational problems. But value them we do.

3) Until March of 2020. And then we shut them down. And now we see so many problems. Because we shut down something we've never fully backed away from previously. That has a lot of deep implications beyond the immediate, narrow questions of whether Learning Objectives 2b and 2c on Official Checklist B612 were met. There's always a way to check a box and pretend that you did so honestly.

But walking away from one of your few (supposedly) ironclad commitments? That does something to a culture. That sort of thing can shut down a whole bunch of non-obvious circuits. The conservative in me thinks we flipped a switch on things we never understood and don't really know how to reboot. A progressive optimist would say "Oh, just fund these programs that are Recommended By Experts. It's Best Practice." But I don't think societies are that simple.