René Girard's Science Through David Deutsch's Theory of Knowledge

My anxieties on Girard's approach finally got resolved

To earn the glorious title of scientific it must combine the maximum of actual uncertainty with the maximum of potential certainty. That is precisely the combination of my hypothesis. Researchers have decided too rapidly, on the basis of past failures, that this combination is only possible in domains that are quantifiable and subject to experimental verification.

This quote comes from René Girard's 1982 book The Scapegoat. After listening to his lectures, I'm pretty sure the "glorious" in the first sentence is written with playful sarcasm. It is entirely possible that Girard anticipated the discomfort those of us with a science and engineering background might have at his approach. After all, he spent many years teaching at Stanford.

I'm not alone in this discomfort. If there's anyone who could act as a human barometer to the reception of Girard's ideas outside the academe, it’s

Luke Burgis

. He wrote Wanting, today's most popular introduction to Girard's mimetic theory (it was my own gateway drug). He observed:

Here’s one interesting example of how misguided I think the “falsifiability” trends is: many people that I’ve talked to over the past few years, including New York Times’ Ezra Klein, have gotten hung up on the idea that René Girard’s mimetic theory does not appear to be “falsifiable”.

The principle of falsifiability, of course, comes from Karl Popper, who in the middle of the twentieth century put forward the idea that for a scientific hypothesis to have credence, it must be inherently falsifiable—that is, theoretically able to be “proved” wrong.

My academic training was in science and engineering, so "falsifiability" was also my knee-jerk filter against woo and pseudo-science. The tension between this filter, Girard's claim to the (glorious) label of scientific, the convincing exposition of his theories, and their usefulness in my life forced me to ask where this filter came from.

In previous posts, I described truth as a map of the territory of reality. In this metaphor, epistemology is the method of making the map. To a hard science supremacist like me, the most trustworthy maps are those made with repeatable measurements of the territory of reality. Girard's challenge made me realize that there was nothing behind my usage of "falsifiability." I never actually studied epistemology, particularly the epistemology of science.

I decided to fix this. I started reading Popper and even took an online course. This eventually led me to David Deutsch's 2011 book The Beginning of Infinity, which distills and improves on Popper's ideas. Several people I trust recommended it after seeing my questions on Twitter. The Silicon Valley guru Naval Ravikant has also been promoting the book. I trust Naval's taste since I've applied his ideas in business and life, and they worked for me. The way Deutsch views knowledge and science helped me overcome my anxieties about Girard’s theories. Here’s how.

Popper's Demarcation Versus Deutsch's Good Explanations

David Deutsch is too British and too much of a Popper fanboy to claim that his criteria for "good explanations" is much more useful than Popper's demarcation between science and non-science, yet this is probably true. Rather than dismissing ideas for not meeting some criterion, it is much better to ask which idea best explains a particular phenomenon.

Take Girard's scapegoat mechanism. We are not doing any good or getting nearer to the truth by merely judging on which side this theory falls in Popper's demarcation. If instead we ask, "What question is this theory a good explanation for?" then we can compare it to other explanations and pick the best one. In anthropology, there are phenomena called "cultural universals," like marriage and gender roles. These are beliefs or practices that appear in most if not all human societies. I was surprised to find out that ritual sacrifice is one cultural universal. Why is this the case? Girard has an explanation.

To Girard, the cognitive abilities that appeared in our long evolution towards humanity came with new dangers. For instance, the uniquely human propensity for vengeance must have destroyed many early societies. A blood feud can escalate into a war of all against all. Societies that are still around today must have found a way to survive this danger. To Girard, this solution was the scapegoat mechanism. Looking at myths and ethnographies of the last archaic societies, Girard observed a pattern that points to an instinct that leads a society in crisis to pick a scapegoat and direct their accumulated hostility towards that chosen individual or subgroup. The unity this sacrifice brings restores order in that society. This happened countless times across the vast timescale of human evolution. At some point, these societies ritualized this recurring founding event. To the pre-scientific mind, the sacrificial murder was the cause of the seemingly miraculous restoration of peace. Later on, animals substituted human sacrifice (though not always). Myths are obscured retellings of this common origin of societies. This explains the similarities of myths all over the world and the universal presence of ritual sacrifice.

Whether or not this is true, it does not make sense to compare the scapegoat mechanism to something like the laws of thermodynamics. They map out different parts of the territory of reality. One territory is located in the deep past, while the other can be measured here and now. It makes much more sense to compare Girard's theory to others that try to explain the same phenomena. ChatGPT told me to check out Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim, and Marcel Mauss.

How do we know which map is better for navigating the territory of reality? Deutsch proposes several criteria for this contest. I'll apply one of them to the scapegoat mechanism here. You can ask your favorite A.I. assistant to explain the rest.

Deutsch says that good explanations have "reach." If you create a map that corresponds to reality, it tends to be useful for other territories as well. Our map metaphor breaks down at this point. Perhaps a "playbook" applicable to multiple situations is a better image for the reach of good explanations. For instance, “evolution through natural selection” is a good explanation for the diversity and similarity of living organisms. The same explanation can be used to make sense of the spread of ideas (memes) and human behavior.

Is Girard's Scapegoat Mechanism a Good Explanation?

I inadvertently tested the reach of Girard's scapegoat mechanism by crossing it over with Venkatesh Rao's Gervais Principle, a dark, tongue-in-cheek model of the power dynamics in the modern office environment. Rao's model gave me a cynical view of the world almost against my will. Girard's scapegoat mechanism grounded Rao's model on human nature. That essay follows Girard's observation of how the effectiveness of the scapegoat mechanism has diminished in recent times, which leads to his critique of Nietzsche. This critique was the key that unveiled the sleight-of-hand Rao used in his model, and which released my mind from that conceptual prison.

That liberation was important to me on a personal level. In upcoming posts, I'll test the reach of the scapegoat mechanism by crossing it over with ideas more palatable to the academe. I'm currently doing an MA in Anthropology (it's a long story), so these might end up as academic papers. One classic film in the field is Margaret Mead's "Trance and Dance in Bali." Filmed between 1936 and 1939, it depicts a Balinese ritual dance that involves a trance state. To a Girardian, the elements of the ritual will look strikingly familiar: chaos in society, a monster killing a baby, a literal witch hunt, a dragon that fights the witch, a murderous mob, and a man in a trance state biting off the head of a chicken. This hits so close to home, not only because of Indonesia’s proximity to the Philippines but because I've seen this gruesome decapitation first-hand in a rural town fiesta in my teens.

(Update: I wrote this Girard x Mead crossover four months after this essay)

One hypothesis I want to explore is the role of trance in the mimetic escalation that Girard theorizes, leading to a war of all against all. Dance has a curious advantage over other media used for relaying myths across time, such as stories and the written word. The trance induced in the Balinese ritual dance might be a record of the psychological state of the murderous orgy leading to the lynching of the scapegoat.

This leads to another possible area of investigation. In The Scapegoat, Girard uses the massacres of Jews in medieval Europe as a more recent example of the scapegoat mechanism. In Southeast Asia, migrant Chinese craftsmen and merchants have played roles similar to Jews in medieval Europe. And like the Jews, they have also experienced massacres across the centuries. This happened several times in the Spanish colonial era of the Philippines (e.g., 1603). The most recent one is probably the May 1998 Riots of Indonesia, where more than a thousand ethnic Chinese Indonesians were killed. Can our modern understanding of mob dynamics shed light on the scapegoat mechanism?

Another idea I want to explore is how the scapegoat mechanism might be a sort of vestigial organ that gets reactivated in situations of societal chaos. With the modern art of propaganda, sociopaths can summon this demon and ride it to the heights of power. Girard observed that scapegoating is the ultimate craft of statesmanship. The DARPA document "A Memetics Compendium" points out that mass movements "can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil." Or in extremely online jargon:

https://www.explorations.ph/i/138274602/normie-psychopath-autist

(If you're an academic interested in collaborating on developing these ideas, please reach out via kngcorazo@addu.edu.ph)

The Mystery of Creativity

The villain in The Beginning of Infinity is the epistemology of "induction," or the idea that we create theories stemming from our collection of data from the world. In the book, Deutsch argues that this is a misconception. My favorite demonstration of this is the 2009 PNAS article entitled "Darwin and the scientific method." In it, the author, Francisco J. Ayala, shows how Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species to persuade an inductionist audience, as this was the prevailing epistemology at that time. However, what actually happened was Deutsch's alternative: theories come from human creativity, which are then tested through the crucible of real-world data. According to Ayala,

The inductionist canon called for making observations without prejudice as to what they might mean and accumulating observations related to a particular subject so that a universal statement or conclusion could eventually emerge from them. Indeed, in one place in his Autobiography, Darwin affirms that he proceeded “on true Baconian principles and without any theory collected facts on a wholesale scale”.

The facts are very different from these claims, however. Darwin's notebooks and private correspondence show that he entertained the hypothesis of the evolutionary transmutation of species shortly after returning from the voyage of the Beagle and, all important, that the hypothesis of natural selection occurred to him in 1838; several years before he claims to have allowed himself for the first time “to speculate on the subject.”

My own unconscious inductionist assumptions emerged when I reacted to Girard's provocation of my unexamined epistemology. I asked what Girard's "methodology" was on Twitter. I thought the Girardian scholar Cynthia Haven was joking when she replied, "His ‘methodology’? He liked to read books." It turns out she was right. I have not seen the primary source, but I've heard a couple of people (including Burgis) relay how Girard "saw" his theories early in his career and spent his life elaborating and explaining them.

In The Beginning of Infinity, Deutsch explains that today's scientific community still does not have a good explanation for human creativity, but also that it is clearly the source of our maps of reality. The role of science is to prove these theories wrong. The theories with the least damage from the most criticism are our truest maps of reality—until a better one emerges from someone's creativity.

Girard's scapegoat mechanism is similar to Darwin's evolution through natural selection in how they both happened in the deep past. Darwin's answer to "How come we have a variety of seemingly related but different species?" cannot be tested, strictly speaking. However, his theory fits extremely well with other testable maps of reality. For instance, our knowledge of the chemistry of molecules like DNA and how digital data is stored in physical media are measurable here and now and fits so well with the explanation of evolution. Adjacent studies on trance, pogroms, and mass movements could play the same role in Girard's scapegoat mechanism.

Fitting My Mind Versus Changing My Mind

Let me close on a personal note. It was surprising how Deutsch's ideas fit my mind so well. He did not change my mind. He merely expressed better what I've thought or what I would have thought. For instance, my “Life is Antifragile Information” (which I thought was original) is like a summary of one of the sections of the book. I skimmed through the deep physics parts, which I don't have the training to grasp. In contrast, reading Girard was like grappling with someone from a different martial art. Yet Girard’s ideas made me change my life. As mentioned in previous posts, I stopped pursuing a business I've been working on for years, and I'm voting again after two decades.