Anybody who wants to explore anthropologically​ the possible tribal role this role of kind of insidious tendency to scapegoat an outgroup (that seems to be an intrinsic part of the way cultures use language) might possible have had in the origin of language itself, check out the work of Rene Girard.

tl;dr: Girard thought that scapegoats were among the very first things we had words for as a species, because of the adaptive group response that sacrificing a scapegoat had in bringing together the accepted members of the tribe together in rallying against the scapegoat and the outgroup he or she represented (be it a competing tribe, or simply weird or "witch-like" behavior at odds with the norms of the tribe).

Girard saw Jesus Christ as the central figure in history that for the first time in a very big way sought to put an end to sacrificial violence against scapegoats, by dying for all of mankind's sins once and for all.

Very cool then that "killing" Jesus would be a reason to scape goat.

(That's an unfair dig that's not particularly charitable to Girard but I couldn't resist.)

I'm not a huge expert on the New Testament, but I don't believe there is much in there about taking vengence on the Romans.

Which, you know, is a big improvement over the Old Testament stuff about obeying the Lord so he can help you smite the other tribe.

I'm interested though... what does he make of animal sacrifice? Is animal sacrifice still able to absolve the community of its internal conflicts? Does he treat it as an advancement, or as superior, to a society that performs human sacrifice?

I was talking about Jewish persecution. (hence the air quotes)

Ohhhh.

Well yes.

Turns out, not everyone who acts in the name of Christ is really following his teachings. :downs:

Hey look, I just scapegoated a severe genetic disability with that emoticon.

This stuff is everywhere in the culture.

Girard was Christian, and I think the New Testament​ had a thing or two to say about animal sacrifice.

But Girard doesn't think that scapegoats are merely necessary for establishing the solidarity of the group by defining it against an Other, right? The violence is also supposed to absolve those who commit violence against each other within the community too, correct? Isn't the violence supposed to have a purgative effect on the community, so that, through the sacrifice, the violations of the members of the group on each other are absolved?

You know what's really weird?

Peter Thiel was a close friend of Girard in the later years of his life. But somehow Thiel's radical libertarian ideology doesn't seem to square all that well with Christianity.

From what I've heard about, all Thiel learned from Girard is that because the competition that results from what he called a mimetic desire to covet and then immitate... we (now for Thiel's part of the idea) should try to start companies that are granted a monopoly and therefore don't have to compete. LOL

OTOH, Thiel threw some money at Aubrey de Grey, so maybe he's not all bad?

Yeah, but I think he also has a developmental understanding of religion. I got the impression that this theory naturalizes Christianity by showing that it's the most developed form that religion takes, in terms of satisfying a deep need in human nature in a way more humane than any religion that preceded. So RE: animal sacrifice, I was thinking he had the religion of the ancient Israelites or the ancient Greeks -- or, for that matter, any other religion that performed ritualized animal sacrifice -- in mind.

That all sounds correct from what I remember.

Actually, I've pretty much told you everything I know about this topic.

Huh. I didn't think of the crucifixion of Jesus as sort of an ultimate scapegoat sacrifice but that makes much sense.

If you trust Nietzsche, he has a quote in Daybreak about the need for blood to be spilled as people became agrarian, and in fact from what I saw the general consensus is sacrifice and cruel rituals became common in post-agrarian societies, not before.

But it lends credence to Nietzsche's slave morality. If we have a need to turn violence inwards, that probably starts with scapegoats, and slowly in history that violence gets turned inwards.. towards ourselves.

I wouldn't go so far as to argue that Girard's theory is factually correct. Like the origin stories in the Tanakh, it may provide a useful map for an interesting subject (namely, that of the topic of this thread), but I wouldn't go so far as to say that the map is the territory. Girard was not a scientist.

More interesting to me is how people continue to use language today, and that his little fable seems to illuminate that more readily that it feels like it has rights to, when he came up with a theory seemed in his own religious thought on how, perhaps, language could have arisen.

I would argue that, even if Girard's theory is not anthropologically correct, it actually has a hell of a lot to do with the way people are using tribal language to spread memes on places like 4chan, and has everything to do with the reversion of our democracy back toward tribal instincts, as the (as Jon puts it) SNR tends toward zero (stuff like "your argument isn't wrong because it's bad, it's wrong because it's funny when I attach it to a meme about a covetous Jew").

In fact, I originally stumbled upon Girard's theory of mimetics when Google tried to autocorrect a search I made about the word memetics. The two fields actually have a lot to do with each other, even though Dawkins' theory of memetics is sort of a clumsy analogy from biology that encroaches upon territory already well traversed by those in the humanities, under the banner of (IIRC) semiotics.

Funny how the scapegoats haven't changed in 100 years when the last round of fascism took root.

It's almost as if the world goes through cycles of barbarism and civility.

hmm I wonder what happened in the 1930s that is also happening today

Mugatu!

I want to see the context of that Daybreak quote. Curious what exactly about agrarian culture makes sacrifice so important. It seems as if it could go in so many different directions.

Is there a special connection between nation and soil, for instance? So that the very notion of land ownership as the basis of food security brings about the demand that some be willing to sacrifice themselves for the collective, in fights between communities over territory? So that the seeds of modern, militaristic nationalism existed in the earliest forms social organization? Curious if Nietzsche goes down a path like this. I suspect he doesn't.

Some sort of collective need to sanctify the fields with blood, because the fields take on a divine status because humans are so dependent on them for sustenance? Wish I had a copy of the text.

Do you think there are maps that are the territory? Other than a sandbox terrain model being the map of that same sandbox terrain model etc.

There's definitely a 3do of it

By semi-civilized I presume he means agrarian, or at least it seems valid. I think he's not saying land ownership brings about sacrifice in conflicts against others, rather the opposite: when settling down on land, often there is no other, so an other needs to be invented to release that urge that used to be spent stalking wildlife and other people. It's like a pressure release valve.

I don't know how that relates to militarist nationalism, but you could always look up Nietzsche's thoughts on Laconic virtue. I'm not sure what he would say but it's plain historically that Sparta's hardline militarism and repression benefitted their society in the sense that they lasted much longer than Athens. But I'm not sure Nietzsche's stance on that, what I said was Machiavelli's idea.

Nietzsche would probably give it credence in it's backwards trend against modern sentiment. We tend to idolize Athens for being democratic and more full of art, but it also was the weaker city. Nietzsche also wasn't quite so hostile to militarism, as he indicts modern economic society to be more barbarous than militant society. I'll look up more source material in time and we can talk more about this.

Nietzsche also calls modern morality emasculate in the face of ancient societies. Which I believe is basically true. I mean executions used to be sexual, public events where people would literally have sex while the guillotines fell. Cruelty has been a staple in the development of society and it's not clear why, but it seems almost necessary and he's trying to understand that.

When I mentioned sophrosyne I should have explained why I (and Nietzsche) liked the term. Sophrosyne is the virtue of self-awareness and the humility associated with it. As in, if you're ugly, you don't shirk away that fact, you embrace yourself as you are and go forward. And if you're talented you shouldn't show false modesty. It's a morality foreign to our society, and it's painful.

Like, if we had honesty in our morals, we would have to really face the horrors of our economic system. Sophrosyne would demand we examine our system and take it to it's full conclusions. The problem is, when you witness how badly many people are treated, i.e. nets stopping suicidal workers at Foxconn, you're forced to a crossroads, because you can't both consider the workers as fully human and also allow the abuse. Instead we mostly bull**** ourselves and look away. So sophrosyne wants us to either dehumanize the other people or stand against the abuse.

Like, I'll probably never be a first rate mathematician. I get confused often about pretty easy things. It takes more work for me to understand. And I hope people can be honest with me about who I am. But I feel our culture is so far the opposite of honest with ourselves.

I don't know if I'm making sense. But the Greeks had a cruel but honest society. And I wonder to what degree that morality stands better or worse than ours.

Also sophrosyne doesn't allow for Nazis because they were full of ****. An honest German would laugh at how serious the Nazis were about Aryan race bull****.

As far as I know, not until the advent of directly executable symbols-i.e., computer programs.

Of course this is why computer programmers are among the most unenlightened people around (at least Alan Kay suggested this much, though he himself will occasionally admit to playing the cranky old man from a bygone golden age of research), because having executable "maps" doesn't magically mean you don't have your collective head up your ass as a proffession, just because you were seduced by coding as your be all and end all, while remaining oblivious of the dynamics that your virtual reality is embedded physically within (with unintended consequences abounding).

It doesn't help that bugs in code never seem to end, so that programmers aren't allowed to stop thinking within the confines of their fantasy world, either.

Wait, wot?

I mean, I always knew that modern mores on sexuality weren't necessarily the historical norm, but I cant help but find this a little shocking.

Ah, so this is what Joseph Campbell was talking about when he cited Nietzsche here:


It sounds like the original work of the esteemed philosopher is something that I might benefit from reading.

BTW, about the other things you mentioned about agrarian society coinciding with violence... in my lower-division humanities survey course on the global religions (where they showed us the Joseph Campbell stuff), I was told that this thread of violence that winds itself through the rise of hierarchical society is where patriarchy came from. We were shown brief examples of early matriarchical African societies, but which (supposedly) didn't survive, because they were soon overrun by the patriarchal--and therefore warlike and ever-expanding--Egyptian society.

I can't find the source I read that from atm and Google is returning nothing so it may have been bull****. If I find the source I'll send it to you.

And yeah, you should read Nietzsche. I've never been bored or dissatisfied of his works after years. I've also investigated his works quite a bit and they so far always come up true, or true up to interpretation.

For instance, in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche mocks Plato for being a playactor and obfuscating his thoughts, as he thinks philosophers prefer to be misunderstood. At the end he says Plato's big secret wasn't some secret tome of philosophy that cleared up his profound thoughts, but a play by Aristophanes was hidden under his pillow after he died, there were no secret profound works.

Now this is an important detail for many reasons. One, it's absolutely true, the only account of Plato's house I tracked down to a Latin historian Olympiodorus who gives exactly that account. Two, Aristophanes wrote a play mocking philosophers, in which he makes a total ass of Socrates. And Plato resented Aristophanes for mocking his idol. Lastly, Plato was a failed playwrite before he became a philosopher, and always admired Aristophanes and modeled his dialogues after his plays.

In other words, Plato didn't have the humility he ought to have. Just that one passage has taken me years to unravel (partly because my knowledge of the Greeks is weak), but it's amazing how often one line of Nietzsche's will pack a dense amount of information and insight.

Also, a great line from Nietzsche is where he simply points out that Socrates was ugly. Which in ancient Greek culture meant you were a lesser person. What can we derive from Socrates' philosophy given he would have been treated as second rate by his peers? It's hard to imagine that such resentment wouldn't bleed into his thought.

The hubris of magicians continues to manifest itself more directly!



This is also where Aleister Crowley got his 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, love is the law love under will' (well, to the letter he got it from Rabelais) which is so influential and poorly interpreted (ironically probably through slave morality rather than the master morality which he wouldn't shut up about) in contemporary mush brained movements. He was highly influenced by Nietzsche, but Crowley is to Nietzsche as Led Zeppelin is to Tolkien, and Joseph Campbell is a Tolkien scholar or something maybe but neither one is really the same thing as reading the original no matter how much the people at the local pagan community center and arcade fun complex want it to be. But yeah even for a halfwit like me Freddy is a satisfying read because you can do some serious spelunking in even a small amount of text.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCOw0eJ84d8

Also speaking of Freddie has anyone seen The Turin Horse?

Have not

It's about the horse that was involved in him becoming a equine hugging lunatic. It's really good but it's a tonal watch, so consider some substances while you watch it, but watch it closely.

I wonder if spending years of my life thinking about morality might predispose me to losing my mind the moment I witness something sufficiently morally upsetting and forced to watch long enough for all those (previously controllable) deep thoughts to overwhelm me.

If the experience could have possibly cured Alex, who hadn't thought about morality at all, maybe the opposite happens to people when they've thought about it too much and are subject to a similarly harrowing experience?

Or, you know, there was some underlying physical illness.

So not the horse then. Or maybe it just triggered what was already there....

Or is this horse story even true?

I am still inclined to believe that thinking too deeply about something, which artists and philosophers tend to do in general, is a gateway drug to actual insanity, and I speak somewhat from personal experience (although I confess I am probably talking about eccentricity rather than 'insanity'). Of course without an underlying illness my state of mind has always been temporary to the extent that I partially induced it myself and ultimately had control over it. On the other hand, stress can probably put people over the edge too.

Allegedly, but it's certain he collapsed and was basically infirm after that. Only rarely being able to even speak. Which is why I'm doubtful of the idea that his thoughts did that, if it was temporary I can see it, but you don't get bedridden and infirm for ten years that way.

Allegedly he did drugs quite often, had terrible insomnia for much of his life (I think book one of Zarathustra was written in 4 days of 22 hours a day writing). He was also frequently very sick. So it may have been a self-inflicted wound, and his actions to enable thinking may have done that to him, just not the thoughts and their contents.

Syphillis is a hell of a drug.

English, much less Spanish, and much, much less Danish.