Athenian Democracy, its Creation and Rituals, as Seen by Murray Bookchin: a Treasure Trove of Inspiration for Efforts to Recreate True Democracy

Update 10/10/2019: Democracy is a state of society where “the people” are supposed to have equal political rights. Some aspects of its evolution include (re-)defining, again and again, who “the people” are, as well as the scope and meaning of their rights. In the place where “civilized” democracy (as opposed to that of hunter-gatherers) had its beginnings, i.e., Athens, some thinkers saw democracy as fraught with pitfalls, e.g., Plato, who in the Republic foresaw its degeneration into tyranny. Some contemporary thinkers on the other hand, like Hannah Arendt, criticized its unsatisfactory record regarding people’s agency, focusing as she did in this respect on the issue of human rights (man’s de facto universal prerogative under its liberal variant). Those are but a few of many objections leveled at democracy.

According to Plato democracy is preceded by oligarchy as a system of government. In terms of mimetic theory oligarchy, as well as timocracy and aristocracy that precede it, may be regarded broadly as a system where external mediation of desire is preeminent, aristocracy being its purest embodiment. Democracy on the other hand may be seen as embodying internal mediation of man’s mimetic desire. Its degeneration into tyranny might then be regarded as one possible consequence, or aspect, of its inherently competitive, rivalrous if not, finally, conflictual nature.

That is a very pessimistic view of man as a political animal. Murray Bookchin, preeminently in his book The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship, presents an alternative scenario. He employs examples drawn from Athenian democracy to flesh it out. The main postulate is for democracy to be direct or at least, broadly, participatory – as opposed to representative. For inspiration, he sketches how such a system came to be in sixth-century B.C. Athens and, crucially, how it was fostered by a spirit and practice of paideia, making for an informed and committed citizenry; an agential citizenry largely able to control “unthinking mimesis” in their midst.

When I wrote my blog over a week ago I couldn’t have possibly foreseen how topical it might become shortly thereafter. An experiment in participatory democracy, along the lines proposed by Bookchin, has been afoot in Rojava, in a war-torn northeast Syria, since 2013. Just as Athenian democracy was effectively quashed by Alexander the Great, it appears that the present experiment may share its fate at the hands of an army second only in size to that of the U.S. in NATO. 

XXX

Democracy in the West is in severe crisis, its line of development questioned both in theory and in practice, the institutions of its dominant liberal variant under attack. Many of those who consider ways of its regeneration seek how to introduce direct or participatory democracy in contemporary circumstances, inspired as some of them are by Athenian democracy.

One of such people was the late Murray Bookchin, the author of such books as The Ecology of Freedom and The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship. His thought remains a major source of inspiration for Rojava, in a war-torn northeast Syria, where an effort to create a meaningful democracy is underway among Kurds and various other, mostly Islamic, ethnicities living there. It is called democratic confederalism, and is largely a practical transposition and implementation of Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism.

What follows below are quotes from The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship focusing on two major themes: (1) How a democratic polity in Athens was crafted by a handful of statesmen, with a view to this process providing a lesson for us, if not directly certainly by analogy and inspiration; (2) Athenian democracy’s various rituals and theatrical dramas as a practice of paideia, a fostering of a rational and committed citizenry. For Bookchin Athenian paideia and polis were of a piece, and must never be viewed otherwise. Moreover, they provide crucial lessons for us that may be ignored only at our peril.

As may be gleaned from the quotes, Bookchin draws a sharp, if summary, distinction between Athenian democracy and Roman republicanism, pivoting around democracy being participatory in character and a republic – representative, on the one hand, and this distinction having practical consequences for the type of citizen that prevails in each system, on the other hand. Again this is highly informative.

“The Eumenides, the last drama of the [Oresteia, Aeskylos's] trilogy, celebrates the victory of civic law and rationality over tribal custom and unthinking mimesis”: Societal “unthinking mimesis” is seen here as something that has been, and still can be, transcended by a skillfully designed and cultivated democratic order, in contradistinction to its being viewed, e.g., by followers of Rene Girard, as an inescapable and unwitting force responsible for much of what ills society in our apocalyptic times. Participatory democracy is about (re-)gaining agency, both at an individual and a societal level. Mimesis certainly need not be unthinking: there is a lot to be learned and adapted from the Athenians. Indeed, in order to thrive, if not survive, we may need to become new Athenians – a trite call perhaps but a tall order!

 xxx

(1) The Greek democrat, Kleisthenes, is almost a symbol of… shrewd maneuvers, maneuvers by no means unique to the Athenian polis. To break the hold of family ties that obstructed the power of civic institutions, the citizenry was organized into territorial "wards," but each "ward" was felicitously called a "tribe." The municipal space of Athens, in effect, was expanded to create a largely civic citizenry, unencumbered by the mindless tribal obligations and blood oaths that impeded the rights of the stranger but in a form that wore the symbols and enjoyed the prestige of tribal tradition.[…]

A face-to-face relationship between active citizens for the purpose of arriving at a consensus is alien to republican systems of government. A democracy is participatory; a republic, representative. The first involves the exercise of power directly by the people; the second, its delegation to selected surrogates, who then reconstitute the political realm that initially existed at the base of the koinonia into a distinctly separate and usually professional power at its summit. Republics are beyond the immediate reach of popular control; democracies are not even confronted by the issue of the displacement of power.[…]

Kleisthenes, the head of the aristocratic Alcmaenodae, became archon in 506 B.C., and the democraticization of Athens was launched in earnest. Kleisthenes struck decisively at the societal basis of aristocratic power – the traditional kinship network that gave the Attic nobility its very sense of identity. The ancient Greek phratries and clans were simply divested of any political power and gradually declined in importance for want of any significant functions. The old Ionian system of four ancestral tribes was converted into ten strictly territorial "tribes" based exclusively on residence. The villages and towns of Attica, in turn, became outlying sections of Athens and were designated as "demes" instead of genoi. Politics now became inseparable from territorialism: the demes, with their own popular assemblies, were grouped together in varying numbers into thirds or trittyes, and three trittyes, in turn, constituted a tribe, hence Attica was composed of thirty trittyes. Ten of the thirty demoi were composed of residents in or around Athens; another ten, from the maritime districts; and the remainder from the interior.

Kleisthenes shrewdly placed one urban trittys in each of the ten tribes, so that the Attic agrarians from whom the nobles garnered whatever popular support they had were politically buffered by city citizens – the men who were to form the backbone of the democracy. This switch in the governance system of the polis was strategic: it fostered the power of a citizenry that was distinctly urbane, cosmopolitan, and forward looking, vitiating the strongly hierarchical structure of a once-entrenched, highly parochial, feudal class system. At the same time, tradition was kept alive by using the language of the tribal world (even the word gene had a special clannish origin), retaining a number of local religious associations, chieftain-like figures such as demarchs (the deme's version of the Athenian archons), and by making membership in a deme hereditary even though a citizen might choose to reside at some later time in another part of Attica. Kleisthenes, in effect, "revolutionized" Athenian political life in the literal sense of the term: he replaced a once-egalitarian tribal system that had been perverted into a harsh feudal hierarchy by a tribalistic structure that actually restored the old freedoms of the people on an entirely new political and societal level. Athens had "revolved" in a full circle – more precisely, a spiral – to the isonomia of its tribal past, but without the innocence that made the early Greeks vulnerable to hierarchy and domination.

The boule was increased from a council of four hundred to five hundred and restructured so that fifty men from each of the ten tribes rotated every tenth of the year as an administrative "executive committee" between sessions of the ekklesia. Each tribe selected its fifty bouleutes by lot, a practice that became so widespread that even archons were so chosen from members of the boule, as were members of Athenian juries (dikastoi) and lesser functionaries. Apart from the polis's magistrates, no property qualifications debarred Athenian citizens from participating in the governance system, and under Perikles the last restrictions that lingered on from Kleisthenes's reforms disappeared completely. In time, members of the boule, the ekklesia, and the heliaea or courts were compensated for participating in these institutions, generally on a per diem basis and in the case of the boule, annually. No public office could be held for more than a year, and with certain exceptions (jurymen and generals) none could be held more than twice in a lifetime.

This extraordinary opening of public life to the Athenian citizenry was completed during the sixty years that saw Kleisthenes assume the archonship in 492 B.C. and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431… [W]hat counts is the way the democracy formed the citizenry and, in turn, was formed by it. Democratic leaders such as Kleisthenes and Perikles did not foist a remarkably open system of participatory governance on a passive people; the institutional structure and the body politic interacted closely with each other against a haunting background of quasi tribal social forms and relationships. This is politics at its best – in a lived sense, not a formal one. The Athenian notion of arete, the daily practice of paideia, and the institutional structure of the polis were synthesized into an ideal of citizenship that the individual tried to realize as a form of self-expression, not an obligatory burden of self-denial. Citizenship became an ethos, a creative art, indeed, a civic cult rather than a demanding body of duties and a palliative body of rights. At his best, the Athenian citizen tried not only to participate as fully as possible in a far-reaching network of institutions that elicited his presence as an active being; the democracy turned his participation into a drama that found visible and emotional expression in rituals, games, artwork, a civic religion – in short, a collective sense of feeling and solidarity that underpinned a collective sense of responsibility and duty. This drama extended beyond life itself. The Athenian citizen had little hope of any certain immortality other than the memory he left behind in the polis. Afterlife became a form of political life and eternality existed only insofar as noble political actions were memorable enough to become part of the polis's history and destiny.[…]

xxx

(2) Like the agora, the "contests and games" of Athens often created a shared sense of preternatural civic enchantment. The democrats knew this very well and these "contests and games" occurred with considerable frequency… [E]very year, many days were devoted to the Lesser Mysteries in February and the Greater Mysteries in September, rituals that centered around Persephone's descent into Hades and Demeter's mourning, the mythical explanation for the occurrence of winter and its lean months. Every July, Athenians participated in the Lesser Panathenaia, which culminated quadrennially in the Greater Panathenaia, an extraordinary parade of Athenians and Athenian life in full array, if we are to judge from the bas relief that girdles the Parthenon. Almost every month, Athenians witnessed or participated in a variety of rituals, contests (athletic, musical, poetic, and choral), or celebrations to honor deities, historic events, great personages, victors in Panhellenic festivals such as the Olympics or the fallen of past and recent battles. Religion and civic loyalty blended the great variety of personal and social interests within the body politic into an underlying commonality of outlook that, if it did not remove serious conflicts, rarely reached such desperate levels that they could efface the democracy from within. Ultimately, it was to be Macedonian rule that brought the democracy to its definitive end, not the Athenians. For all its shortcomings, the democracy in various forms persisted through nearly two of the most stormy centuries of the ancient world and, at its height, exhibited a degree of cultural and intellectual creativity that has no peer in western history.

Perhaps the most important of the Athenian festivals was a comparatively new one: the City Dionysia. Even more than the Greater Panathenaia, when all of Athens went on display with a large tapestry (the pelops) that depicted the triumph of Olympian "reason'' over the chthonic rule of "force," the City Dionysia was strongly democratic in its focus. It was then, for three out of a span of six days that overlapped March and April, that Athenians could witness the great dramatic tragedies that gave the democracy its ideological meaning. By the thousands, Athenians flocked to the Theater of Dionysus on the southeast slope of the Acropolis to see the plays of Aeskylos, Sophokles, Euripides, and others who literally created serious drama in western culture. Under the clear skies of a high Mediterranean spring, they watched with absorption the Aeskylean drama of their own polis and its human antecedents unfold with a majesty that may have verged on reverence – certainly a thrilling sense of exaltation… Aeskylos's trilogy, the Oresteia, advanced a powerful validation of the democracy that, in its emotional and declaratory power, may even exceed the funeral oration of Perikles – a trilogy that was constantly replayed and kept winning prizes at the City Dionysia long after the author's death.

Its story has been told and interpreted repeatedly... Let it suffice to say that the murder of Agamemnon, the returning chief of the besiegers of Troy, by his wife, Klytemnestra, followed by her own death at the hands of her vengeful son, Orestes, opens the whole drama of Athens's transformation from a quasi-tribal society, rooted in kinship rules, custom, and chthonic deities, into a political community – a polis – based on residence, reason, and the anthropomorphic Olympians. It is Athene who, in a challenging statement against the Erinyes (the three female guardians of "matriarchal" blood ties and tribal retribution for the murder of one's kin), solemnly declares:

“It is my task to render final judgement here.
This is a ballot for Orestes I shall cast.
There is no mother anywhere who gave me birth,
and, but for marriage, I am always for the male
with all my heart, and strongly on my father's side.
So, in a case where the wife has killed her husband, lord of the
house, her death shall not mean most to me. And if the other votes
are even, then Orestes wins.”

After being pursued by the Erinyes for committing a blood crime more damning than a marital one – and particularly against his mother from whom early tribal descent may have been traced – Orestes is absolved and the Erinyes reconciled by acquiring a civic status as Eumenides, the kindly ones who look after the well-being of the Athenian polis.

The trilogy has many levels of meaning, probably all of which had a gripping effect on the audience that knew Aeskylos personally or, in later years, by reputation. The Eumenides, the last drama of the trilogy, celebrates the victory of civic law and rationality over tribal custom and unthinking mimesis. Athene, born of Zeus's head, embodies logos and justice. In a strongly patriarchal society that saw male rationality as the sole bulwark to dark chaos and an uncertain, untamed world, it was not difficult to identify "fickle" woman with nature and the polis as the sole realm of freedom and law. Orestes' trial, which marks the culmination of the trilogy, is presented as a new dispensation in the affairs of men. The Erinyes unrelentingly pursue any homicidal perpetrator of the blood tie. All that counts with them is the act of murder of one's kin, not the circumstances or motive that produced it. To the Athenians, this behavior was evidence of unreasoning tribalism, of an irrationality that precluded any civic union based on discourse, logic, and orderly compromise. Recourse to trial rather than ordeal, to the weighing of circumstantial evidence, motive, and logical judgement rather than mere action and contests of fortitude, marked the first step toward a political koinonia – the city as a polis.

To the Athenian audience, which believed Athens was the first city to establish a system of laws, the trial of Orestes was a founding act. Athens's decision to try homicide by a judicial process literally created the polis as an ethical union based on justice. "If it please you, men of Attica," intoned Athene, the patroness of the polis, "hear my decree now, on this first case of bloodletting I have judged. For Aegeus' population, this forevermore shall be the ground [the Hill of Ares] where justices deliberate .... No anarchy, no rule of a single master .... I establish this tribunal. It shall be untouched by moneymaking, grave but quick to wrath, watchful to protect those who sleep, a sentry on the land." Henceforth, justice, not tradition; reason, not custom; fact, not ordeal; motive, not myth are to guide the men of Attica, for without this new dispensation, the polis has no ethical meaning, nor does the democracy have an ethical rationale.

It is easy to see in Aeskylos not only the clearest voice of the polis, of a body politic free of arbitrary rule, but also of the democracy… To the Athenians, who apparently revered Aeskylos, the Oresteia unfolds the emergence of justice from a hazy "dark" world of tribal antiquity and its fortunes in the arbitrary domain of warriors, nobles, and the genoi, into the clear light of the polis and its orderly citizenry. The identification of the audience with the drama must have been intensely personal; it was the authentic protagonist of the play. Of Aeskylos's remaining dramas, Prometheus Bound arrests us to this very day with its message of heroic defiance against unfeeling authority and its expansive belief in humanity's sense of promise, indeed its capacity to advance toward an ever-wider horizon of intellect and wisdom. […]

To the Hellenic citizen of a polis, leaving all its mythic origins aside, the [modern] monad would have seemed as pre-human as the folk community seemed pre-political. Individuality meant citizenship. And, ideally, citizenship meant the personal wholeness that came from deep roots in tradition, a complexity of social bonds, richly articulated civic relationships, shared festivals, philia, freedom from clientage and freedom for collective self-determination through institutions that fostered the full participation and everyday practice of a creative body politic. To be such a citizen, one had to live in a polis – a city that possessed an agora, a space to convene general assemblies of the people, a theater to dramatize the reality and ideology of freedom, and the ceremonial squares, avenues, and temples that gave it reverential meaning. To remove any of these elements that made up this whole was to instantly destroy it. Without every one of them, cultivated on a daily basis by the paideia of citizenship and guided by an unerring concept of arete, the Athenian ideal of citizenship fell apart and its institutions became hollow forms. […]

The polis was no less a theater for the practice of virtue than the orchestra at the foot of the Acropolis was a home for the performance of the plays it watched. And the citizen was no less an actor in a great civic drama than the men who performed for him with masks in the City Dionysus. In both cases, the plot we call the history of Athens incorporated the layered traditions that formed its cultural biography and ideology. So central was the citizen to this plot with his "freedom for" as well as his "freedom from," that the histories of the time, when they refer to Attica, speak more commonly of "the Athenians" than they do of "Athens." Unerringly, they reveal that Athens was no mere collection of structures, no simple geographic locale, that any aggregate of people could occupy without the polis losing its authenticity. Admittedly, the city outlived the polis, and the democracy in a formal sense outlived the citizens. Democratic institutions persisted in a truncated form long after Athens's final defeat by the Macedonians at Krannon in 322 B.C. No city was a polis, in Aristotle's view, unless it had an agora; but, needless, to say, no agora could have produced a democracy unless it had the kind of citizen the historians of that day called "the Athenians."

What Mimetic Theory Can Learn from Hunter-Gatherers: Implications for Progressive Christians

Hominization was not originated by an act of random murder, most probably neither was culture. Man’s early evolution produced egalitarian collaborating hunter-gatherers, who hunted large game and killed bullies within their midst; the transition to more complex societies and symbolic cultures brought the concomitant emergence of social hierarchies, who then controlled repressive sacrificial mechanisms to solidify their positions. Instead of being merely descriptive, mimetic theory should promote loving mimesis – not the least to be true to what it identifies as the moral leaven of humanity, as well as to help bring down existing sacrificial power structures in the process.

xxx

To set the scene for the present essay here is a pertinent quotation from Rene Girard: “The process of getting not only the dominating animal but the whole culture to give up that grabbing attitude and give everything to the other in order to receive from the other – this is totally counterintuitive. One cannot explain taboos, prohibition and the complexity of symbolic exchange systems simply via biological explanations of the emergence of unselfish behavior. There must be that upheaval there, which forced the change in behavior. This upheaval is absolutely indispensable. The same reasoning can be applied to language. The only thing that can produce such a relational structure is fear, fear of death… Fear is essentially fear of mimetic violence; prohibition is protection from mimetic escalation. All these incredibly complex phenomena were triggered by the founding murder, by the scapegoat mechanism… one needs a catastrophic moment in the evolutionary process, which isn't solely tied to encephalization. This catastrophe is the mimetic crisis, the deadly struggle of all against all, in the Hobbesian sense, which isn't a fanciful hypothesis but a dreadful reality.” (Rene Girard, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture)

Yet there is now much hardly disputable evidence that there never was a “state of nature” as envisioned by the likes of Hobbes – or Rene Girard, for that matter. Additionally, which is pertinent to the latter’s thought, hominization would not have been about random originary murder but rather about egalitarian cooperation that made possible the subsistence of small human bands of hunter-gatherers once they turned to large-game hunting (cf. Christopher Boehm, Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame). Another difficulty with Girard’s hypothesis of the one-shot random innocent-victim murder that resulted in the foundation of culture or civilization is that it would have happened much later than the universally attested forager stage of human development – but then it cannot have been the initial spark for hominization, as posited by Girard: its onset all versions of the theory of evolution situate much earlier (and that includes language acquisition, too).

As Boehm (cf. also Richard Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution) persuasively asserts, foragers as a group did kill people in a premeditated manner instead – occasionally, on an “as-needed” basis, and, importantly, not in a sacrificial or ritualistic manner – to thus deal with bullies and other would-be dominators within their midst, apparently to preserve their egalitarian societal order that seemingly served them so well for millennia. That order was a significant advance over that of the apes, a highly hierarchical one, making new forms of eking out a living possible. It is posited by Boehm that it was concomitant with if not the result of switching to large-game hunting that required cooperation of the whole band to be successful. Bullying and other forms of free riding were highly detrimental to the wellbeing of the band, and thus had to be dealt with one way or another. Group killing, or group-decided killing, was one such way, on top of ostracism, shunning and banishment that would have been meted out also to cheats, thieves and other deviants. Consequently, people carrying pronounced dominance genes in order to survive had to develop a degree of self-control sufficient to keep them out of trouble, as had other deviants too. They all had thousands of generations to accomplish that – against the backdrop of a late Pleistocene climate volatility that made for very precarious living conditions – and thus to be able to keep their socially rather unappreciated genes in the gene pool. It is posited additionally that self-control was a step towards the development of human conscience as we know it. Arguably though the most important takeaway from this research for the present essay is that our genetic endowment makes the vast majority of us averse to inequality, as well as fiercely counter-dominance oriented if not outright antihierarchical.

xxx

But obviously what Girard claimed that was made possible by the founding murder was “culture” or “civilization,” best denoted with a capital “C,” replete with myths and rituals reflecting and disguising that murder, and which rituals were able to effect social peace and cohesiveness (to be restored by an outbreak of fresh murderous scapegoating if the rituals wore off and all else failed). Those rituals would be officiated by an emerging priestly caste that would have taken the place of shamans; kings, replacing tribal chieftains, and a warrior class would follow suit, solidifying patriarchy in the process, etc.: that is what “culture” entails – the creation of social stratification or hierarchy. (It has been theorized that the earliest form of human social hierarchy was gerontocracy; shamans, emerging to navigate the symbolic universe, would rely on elders’ support, as would chieftains later on.) Now mimetic theory sees the development of social hierarchy favorably, advancing the notion of its conduciveness to the maintenance of societal peace: it is posited as stemming the tide of a societally harmful forms of acquisitive mimesis based on internal mediation of desire – allegedly increasingly prevalent with rising egalitarian mores, and tending to tear societies apart – with its apparently unstoppable culmination in rivalry and conflictual violence. What is thus also seemingly implied is that the stronger the social stratification, the less the need to resort to murderous scapegoating: hierarchical societal order would have largely taken the place of rituals in their role of assuring the peace. All that apparent valorization seems independent of whether culture had a founding murder, let alone whether or not it was random.

Now in terms of mimetic theory’s valorization of social hierarchy as a restrainer of potentially murderous acquisitive mimesis, LPA (late Pleistocene appropriate) foragers of today are especially pertinent – unless one were to outrageously dismiss them as not fully human. Scores of such “uncontaminated” bands are still in existence today, and Boehm’s and others’ work refer to them extensively: they all have language, morality – and an egalitarian societal order that does not practice human sacrifice to maintain the peace. But there is more. The notion that the existence of social hierarchy somehow contributes or has contributed to containing outbreaks of violent scapegoating can be challenged based on recent anthropological research, as reported, e.g., in an April 2016 Nature article, “Ritual human sacrifice promoted and sustained the evolution of stratified societies,” on ninety three traditional Austronesian cultures, ranging from egalitarian to highly stratified: human sacrifice legitimizes political authority and social class systems, functioning to stabilize social stratification once it has arisen, and promotes a shift to strictly inherited class systems (from the Abstract).

In view of the above, valorizing social stratification (as mimetic theory in effect does) entails that sacrificial violence employed by the power structures of social hierarchy, ruthlessly deploying and/or controlling a plethora of sacrificial mechanisms, targeting the underprivileged and marginalized as such violence overwhelmingly does, be disingenuously glossed over as at least less pernicious than potentially violent spontaneous scapegoating that occurs when acquisitive mimesis grounded on internal mediation of desire is given free rein in the absence thereof. Incidentally, on account of this connotation of the ostensibly descriptive mimetic theory progressives may be justified in viewing it as reactionary.

In evolutionary terms the above two-stage sequence could be described as follows: during the long Pleistocene period the gene expression of man’s predisposition to dominance, inherited from the apes, was largely suppressed at the level of phenotype, resulting in social egalitarianism of internally collaborating small human bands; then, during the relatively short Holocene period to date, the ongoing complexification of human society, enabled earlier on by increases in brain size and function (having to do, inter alia, with the need to successfully cope with challenging environmental changes) in due course led to the creation of culture (“murder-founded,” per Girard) that then has superimposed itself on human nature as solidified during thousands of generations, eventually beginning to modify gene expression at the level of phenotype, possibly in an epigenetic manner, and resulting in the present social stratification, as well as in increasing societal centralization, as epitomized in the nation state.

But the egalitarian and – significantly – highly decentralized LPA foragers, making do within a usufructuary economy as they did for extended periods of time, are a memento that perhaps that need not be so, or that the scenario could be reversed or at least modified – due to relatively little time elapsed, genetically speaking. And, contra Girard, such a development would be welcomed by progressives, troubled as they are by some of the very same societal problems that he was.

xxx

Now equality obviously has many various facets, especially in societies much more complex and centralized than hunter-gatherer bands; the material one is only one of them. Yet it is the material plane of desire mediation and rivalry that is preeminent in Girard’s thought. That is where his all-important acquisitive mimesis has its origin – even as it can morph into other forms of desirous competition, including that pivoting around recognition (on his view it tends to devolve into the desire to “acquire” the rival’s being). And though social taboos and hierarchy are often able to militate against its conflictual forms even in the face of considerable inequality, the fact is that runaway economic inequality can threaten societal peace even in hierarchical societies while also having a dampening effect on economic progress in the long run – thus creating a vicious circle that can end up in violence, as history demonstrates has often been the case.

On account of the above, liberal democracy’s attempts to somehow combine its constitutive brand of egalitarianism – in terms of political liberties, of human rights, etc. – with a rampant economic inequality that comes on the back of an entrenched, self-perpetuating hierarchy must be viewed as at least disingenuous, if not worse. That is also where mimetic theory seemingly prefers to err on the safe side. But where Girard would see the danger of an escalation to extremes with apocalyptic implications that on his view inevitably results from a crumbling of hierarchies, a progressive worldview would rather build optimistically on that dynamic and encourage its gradual unfolding.

The latter would have to include reflecting on the shape of a political order of society that for the sake of equality would not so much do away with hierarchy altogether as arrive at a dynamic and easily modifiable equilibrium of equality and hierarchy. Modes of flexibility of societal structures would have to be elaborated, then attempted to be provided for in legislation, in order to facilitate progress and change. There are anecdotal contributions to showcase what is at issue, e.g. in the form of practical implementation of distributist ideals in cooperative enterprises, where not only thought is being given to the issue of acceptable relative income inequality, but there is also on-the-ground voting to decide on its levels (vide Mondragon in Spain).

Still broader considerations would have to include the constitution of society, including its current development – the nation state. Decentralization and egalitarian communitarianism should be the name of the game, as well as direct democracy, subsidiarity and confederalism, including an “affinity-based” one for those unwilling to be part of a legacy society that would endure around those new structures and whose norms would certainly remain prevalent for quite some time. That is how hunter-gatherer cues, grounded in their – and our – genetic makeup that the most recent cultural/civilizational developments have not been able to significantly modify, might be adapted to a much more complex world than their simple egalitarian communalism ever was. The late political philosopher Murray Bookchin’s oeuvre might be a good guide forward, even as some of his conceptions are being deployed against all odds in a war-ravaged Rojava in Syria, bringing about there also a major transformation of the social mores of a traditional Islamic society.

xxx

Today we are nearing the other end of the arc of a history that is vividly marked by a dialectic of egalitarianism and hierarchical order. Arguably, and in line with mimetic theory, the recent return to valorization of equality in the West, as relative and disingenuous at times as it appears to be, has been largely driven by a Christianity that has been true to its ideals, viz., anti-sacrificial and radically opposed to victimization. But its present ultra-progressive versions for Girard might just as well be “Christianity à rebours,” seemingly seen by him as akin to or perhaps just another form of what he dismissively called “super-Christianity,” a basically secular movement preoccupied with rooting out all victimization, including the symbolic. There is no denying that this has led to deplorable excesses, but such a blanket view on the part of Girard goes to corroborate for some the reactionary character of his own use of mimetic theory, a theory that additionally is basically negative in its outlook as practically equating its basic concept of mimetic desire with its conflictual side.

Quite the opposite stance is called for now: in trying to defuse potentially conflictual resentment-riven mimesis, true Christianity has to be valiantly self-sacrificial – instead of defending or condoning the existence of vestiges of sacrifice and pockets of victimization inherent in domination and exploitation that result from a hierarchical order that is trying to hold on to its positions even as they come under attack. Girard himself would actually have hard time denying that the arc of truly anti-sacrificial Christianity, such as is the ideal of mimetic theory, points to its disappearance – if that were the only way to preserve its true spiritual thrust: “anti-sacrificial” can only mean “self-sacrificial” when the chips are down. That is the prerequisite of loving mimesis.

Now Girard was initially averse to see Jesus’ intervention as a (last) sacrifice, one meant to do away with all sacrificial violence, via its revelation of the ultimate fruitlessness of the latter; he also held back for a time from accepting the term “self-sacrifice:” as redolent of primitive religion and sacrificial atonement, the notion of (self-)sacrifice was apparently repugnant to him. Yet for a committed Christian there is no obviating the strict need to be ever ready for self-sacrifice – Jesus-wise, in an imitatio Christi manner. And if the ostensibly merely descriptive mimetic theory is to shed its reactionary overtones it should see to it that self-sacrifice in a normative sense (not merely axiological), in a true imitatio Christi manner, viz., on behalf of others, be meaningfully incorporated. That would be entirely compatible with what inspired Girard’s theory in the first place, and as a practical call to action could help bring down enduring sacrificial power structures and thus make the world a better place.

xxx

From the standpoint of mimetic theory positive societal developments could only be effected if we were able to sidestep acquisitive mimesis and move towards a positive one. That certainly is a tall order: it would take a saintly, non-egotistical individual, someone modeled after Jesus, to be him- or herself immune to acquisitive mimesis and able to model loving mimesis for others. In more down-to-earth terms, one would have to practice self-sacrifice as far as his/her own acquisitive mimesis was concerned, actively going against the grain of his/her acquisitive proclivities, and instead projecting onto others a desire for those others’ good and personal growth – for this desire to be imitated by them. Rebecca Adams, who developed the concept of “loving mimesis,” admirably calls this the desire of the subjectivity of the proto-subject: instead of the other’s being, to be appropriated as that of one’s rival, it is his/her subjectivity that is the object of one’s desire – thus conducing to that other’s personal growth.

This view also holds for political leadership, but if it sounds like political fiction today, it unfortunately is: instead of self-sacrificing in a loving service of others, politicians seem hell-bent on aggrandizing themselves, while we tend to be sucked into feeding their egos, especially of those who are charismatic among them. Girard also chose to disregard the positive facet of desire mediation/ modeling. Perhaps it seemed only natural to him within the context of an entrenched hierarchical society he apparently endorsed – though its “advantage,” viz., its reputed ability to hold down violent forms of acquisitive mimesis, be bolstered on the part of the haves by self-righteousness and contempt for ne’er-do-wells, which attitudes normally are constitutive elements of such a society. Certainly there is no room for loving mimesis here, one that would as a consequence make for personal growth and/or transformation of those who otherwise might be giving in to resentment so characteristic of those desiring to emulate their betters.

To tide us over as a society to a time when liberty, equality and solidarity cohere in a workable equilibrium what is needed is charismatic leaders projecting loving mimesis, such as does not shy away from self-sacrifice if need be – and a clearly egalitarian and solidaristic vision of society they would be working towards. No other vision of society is compatible with loving mimesis. Of course practical ramifications of such a vision are massive, and their elaboration a monumental task, not to mention its effective implementation. For starters, in choosing our leaders we should try to move away from being seduced by demagogues intent on aggrandizing themselves, manipulatively directing us to scapegoat our equals while ostensibly leading the fight against “the elites” that they themselves in fact are part of – thus deflecting our potential resentment away from them. The result, as is more and more evident today, is an ever deepening societal polarization that splits society almost exactly in half when the chips are down. This unstable equilibrium is a new katechon, where the elites adroitly leading both sides of any issue – many a time manipulatively foisted on us by demagogues emanating from their ranks – are able to preserve if not solidify their privileged positions via a mimetic game of smoke and mirrors. But not only does it all diminish us, it also prevents our personal growth as well as a transformation of society that would be compatible with the best aspirations of humanity, be they spiritual or otherwise. We can do better than that!

The Ecology of Freedom

…freedom has no “founding fathers,” only free thinkers and practitioners…

Murray Bookchin’s 1982 book The Ecology of Freedom introduces a most revealing distinction, that between equality of unequals and inequality of equals. Its elaboration might yield the following: freedom-based solidaristic/compensatory equality of the de-facto-unequally-endowed vs domination-based de-facto inequality of the ostensibly-equal-(“rights equality”)-but-in-fact-increasingly-not-so.

It broadly parallels the vagaries (or perhaps an inevitable trajectory) of homo sapiens’ social development, from a forager/hunter-gatherer stage – an “organic” society largely grounded not so much on communal property as on usufruct; through an agricultural/feudal one; to a capitalist society culminating in a (neo)liberal order that disingenuously tries to redeem itself by the introduction of subterfuges such as equality of opportunity and equality of rights.

Alternatively it could be described as a movement from an egalitarian community united by a sense of solidarity, through the introduction of a hierarchy, that development leading in turn to forms of social domination, and eventually to social exploitation, then doubling back somewhat via largely ineffective efforts that try to blunt the cruel edge of what human society has become in the process for so many.

But the term equality of unequals is also a beacon that might guide us beyond the current social convulsions. Apparently spanning millennia of social development, it might lead us to build conscious versions, both ecological, mutualistic and libertarian, of a community type that one starts to encounter upon the onset of man’s hominization – ones that, like their early model, are egalitarian, non-hierarchical (cf. e.g. cultural anthropologist Christopher Boehm’s oeuvre), non-coercive, and – crucially – bonded by a sense of solidarity, despite their heightened complexity and enhanced diversity. The latter should be welcomed, says Bookchin: a dynamic unity in diversity is what makes for an ecosystem’s wholeness; diversity not only contributes to communal well-being, it also assures ecological stability.

Bookchin envisages voluntary confederations of such ecocommunities – firmly rooted in their ecosystem – as a fitting culmination of a line of human social development that may lead to a truly “ecological” society. His prospect of non-authoritarian decentralized confederal networks of Communes, composed of small communes based on direct democracy, is not a bad vision to guide us forward, one that apparently gives the fullest scope possible to a sense of freedom that is not egotistical and “proprietary.”

There is also a Christian parallel referred to in the book, perhaps surprisingly for a strictly “ecological” thinker, albeit rather unorthodox, as elaborated in a chiliastic vision of mystic Joachim of Fiore: the Age of the Holy Spirit as the final point of humanity’s development. Its characteristics, especially its “reign of freedom” (supplanting the “reign of justice” of the previous era), are not unlike those proposed by Bookchin for his confederal Communes.

Yellow Vests & the Deadlock of a Devolving Liberal Democracy

Several political commentators announced that the Yellow Vests’ protests signify a new quality in Western politics. They might be right, but if so, what does that really mean? What is it that makes their movement different against the backdrop of the angry political polarization and the splitting of societies in half that everybody has gotten accustomed to these days? Could mimetic theory shed some light on it? (Caveat: The argumentation advanced below is based on much evidence in place that come next French presidential election, French societal polarization is most likely to assume levels characteristic of countries such as the USA and the UK with its Brexit referendum – if it is not at those levels already – unless the whole system collapses or is reformed; the latter in fact being one of the preeminent demands of the Yellow Vests.)

For one, though some call it a “populism from below” that transcends class differences, their protests seem instead to be a reflection of broad economic class divisions, and are mostly able to avoid being embroiled in political distractions nonessential to this perspective: having succeeded in terms of the immediate cause of their movement – Macron scrapping the fuel-tax hike – they demand now a repeal of some other taxes, higher pensions, an increase in the minimum wage, THE RESTORATION OF A WEALTH TAX, AND A LAW FIXING A MAXIMUM SALARY.

Of course societal classes being what they currently are, given the effects of the dominant neoliberal paradigm, are nowhere near as neatly divided around vital issues into class-blind groupings, in many countries into two deeply polarized halves, that manipulations of political demagogues working that paradigm to their advantage would have the populace believe. Consequently, the Yellow Vests so far have rejected any political affiliation, disregarding attempts on the part of opposition political parties, both left and right, inescapably emanating from within the system as they do, to show their support for the movement, while demanding instead a paramount role in politics for referendums, as well as that Macron resign and the National Assembly be replaced with a “People’s Assembly.”

In what way a return of grassroots class-oriented politics might signify a new quality? Certainly that would not mean a lessening of the political polarization in the West, not in an era of social media dominance, when highly-charged developments can spread like wildfire: if it were not for Facebook the leaderless Yellow Vests would not have become a nationwide movement that quickly, if at all. So if one acknowledges deepening societal polarization as one of the biggest problems besetting Western society, how might this development be welcomed as a sign of change? Well, on account of its having a potential to redefine the dividing lines in a context of radical political change, and consequently to reverse this trend in a climate of social solidarity, if only for some time.

To see that potential of unabashed populist class politics one has to realize that presently, on top of mutually and instantaneously reciprocating anger and resentment, the ever more polarized societal moieties resemble one another also in that they both are similarly socially stratified: both right-wing populists and liberal “centrists” have their share of the poor and the wealthy, just as their ancient predecessors before them. It is fair to say that the poor and lower middle classes have been neutralized by society’s reigning oligarchy, who time and again have resorted to coopting their elected representatives into politics as usual or to foisting demagogues on them to further its causes, using smoke and mirrors to show that the existing political divisions are natural and that they reflect those over issues of vital importance to all in society. But obviously that is not the case, and a return of class politics might throw it into sharp relief.

If it were not for this ability to coopt and obfuscate the picture, “the people”, i.e. the poor and lower middle classes, a majority in most Western states and increasingly so, would not demand just lower taxes for themselves (any populist might grant them that; in fact that is what Macron claims to have done in advance of the gasoline tax hike, namely compensating for it by cuts in payroll taxes), but also TAX INCREASES FOR THE WEALTHY, for the state to be able to pay for the essential good quality public services, just as the Yellow Vests are now doing (again: a neoliberal Macron rolled back the so-called solidarity tax on wealth, first introduced back in the 1980s).

And how to avoid the danger of cooptation? Again one such way is by following what the Yellow Vests are doing: staying as a leaderless movement, not electing any official representatives, at least as long as a “People’s Assembly” they are calling for is not convened, and generally keeping at arms’ length any political suitors that (might) appear. (Cf. French philosopher Jacques Rancière, who has long denounced representative democracy, as incapable of producing a genuine democracy, interviewed before the 2017 French election: “The solution is to fight against the system that produces the likes of Marine Le Pen, not to believe that you will save democracy by voting for the first-placed corrupt politician. I still remember the slogan from 2002, ‘Vote for the crook, not the fascist’ [in the second round pitting Jacques Chirac against Jean-Marie Le Pen]. Choosing the crook to avoid the fascist is to deserve both of them. And to prepare the way to having both.”)

In those circumstances if they were to succeed it would only be on a powerful wave of popular support, one that might give them enough steam to carry on politically for quite some time while enjoying considerable majorities – long unseen in polarized Western democratic societies. If they did not manage to succeed, fizzling out just as the Occupy movement has, they at least would not have contributed to an entrenched polarized politics as usual of the West, not on a sustained basis.

So those political commentators announcing that the Yellow Vets’ protests signify a new quality in Western politics might be onto something. Our dysfunctional societal moieties, with their leaders always talking about “the people”, the real people they claim to represent, are not worth defending, and possibly beyond repair from within the system anyway. Rancière: “Today the ‘real people’ is a figure forged by the system itself. We get to a point where we no longer know who will take the different roles: nowadays, a billionaire can represent the people spat upon by the billionaires.” A perfect description of the West’s smoke and mirrors-produced “classless” moiety-based societies, led by demagogues who invariably deceitfully claim to be “against the system.” This is the very configuration that the French Yellow Vests are fighting against from outside that ressentiment-charged scandal-driven system.

To see this movement from a slightly different perspective one might turn to the work of the late Ernesto Laclau, a leftist-populist politics theorist. Some students of his thought are now thinking how to exploit the potential they see in the “empty signifier” (in their Lacanian lingo) that the yellow vest as a symbol is or rather might become if and when the movement fails, which they see as a distinct possibility, at least as long as the movement stays leaderless (contra Rancière). In line with that theory they see a growing need to advance a more consistent political narrative, to forestall a threat of appropriation of some “floating signifiers” associated with the movement, especially by a populist right-wing (as has already been attempted e.g. in Great Britain, with yellow vests donned by far-right Brexiteers resorting to intimidation tactics against “Remoaners”), with a concomitant threat of cooptation of at least a part of the movement, which might result in realigning the remaining fragments possibly along the existing moieties’ lines. Preventing that, as proposed by this progressive-leftist theory, would require turning to outright political action, complete with a charismatic leader. Only then would a protest movement stand a chance of shifting the political balance and the axis dividing society to one broadly based on economic class, which would be anything but a moiety-like division we see currently prevailing, with oligarchs or their proxies busy working their deceit on both sides; in fact on both sides of any artificial division in society. Or so a leftist vision would have it.

xxx

Though Rene Girard referred to societal moieties only on a few occasions, and in contexts much different from those of our postmodern reality, it bears repeating that he in effect acknowledged the double nature of those primitive moieties, namely their tendency to (potentially) foster both differentiation as well as undifferentiation stemming from explicit, potentially conflictual reciprocity (their dangerous twin-like character), though he seems to have seen them preeminently as structured and governed by ritual, thus tending toward societal peace despite being precariously poised. But it is different today, Western societies are now seemingly on a downward spiral, descending into conflictual emotional or expressivist undifferentiation, democratic rituals more and more ineffective, the system’s checks and balances ever more threatened, an equilibrium effected ever more unstable: our postmodern moieties are a far cry from their ancient and primitive predecessors.

Students of mimetic theory would benefit from combining their perspective with those described above, class-oriented as they are, and consequently might see the discussed developments as essentially the breaking of a fraught twin-like deadlock configuration, as a needed and valid societal re-differentiation, and as a return of at least a modicum of meaningful pluralism into the bloodstream of Western liberal democracy. It is doubtful, however, that this would result in a lessening of societal tensions and resentments: even if that was an explicit goal, triumphing egalitarian attitudes most probably would not further it, not in the long run, given their dynamic as predicted by mimetic theory. But that is another story altogether.