Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

What is the significance of the Passion of Jesus Christ for today?

Nothing! will answer most readers of this blog. The event is merely an ancient myth. Science shall eventually prevail and put religion out of business.

The author of I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, René Girard (1923-2015), doesn't entirely disagree, for the Passion is indeed very much myth-like, differing only in one very important way.

Mr. Girard, an anthropologist, was born and educated in France, though he eventually received his PhD in the US, after which his academic career was entirely in America. He retired from Stanford in 1995. His important works are all written in French--the current tome is translated by James G. Williams, who also pens a useful foreword.

Mr. Girard's anthropological interest was the study of primitive and pagan religions and myths. It is only late in life that he converted to Roman Catholicism, and began writing religious books, such as I See Satan..., published in 1999. It may be described as a work of Christian apologetics.

There are two parts to this religion thing: God and Man. Belief in the former requires faith, and can't be derived from reason alone. Mr. Girard makes no effort to "prove the unprovable," and accordingly God is barely mentioned in this book. The latter subject, Man, reduces to anthropology--or at least it has to get the anthropology right. This, of course, is Mr. Girard's wheelhouse--he tells us a lot about Christian anthropology.

A key to understanding the Bible--both Old Testament and New--lies in the tenth commandment:

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife or his male servant or his female servant or his ox or his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

Covetousness is the way Satan enters the world--I'll provide a modern example. Consider the rivalry between Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos,

• Donald envies Jeff for his great wealth, perhaps a hundred-fold greater than what Donald possesses.
• Jeff envies Donald for his charm, charisma and power.

Each envies the other for what he doesn't have. Ultimately, they both want the same thing--to be the richest man in the world who is also president of the United States. In other words, they become like twins--they share the same goals and are in intense competition with each other.

Mr. Girard calls this mimetic rivalry, and pagan myths are replete with brothers, often twins, fighting to the death to successfully imitate the other. Cain murdered his brother Abel. Romulus murdered his twin brother Remus. Joseph was exiled by his jealous brothers (Gen. 37-50). Mr. Girard asserts that such stories are common among primitive peoples around the world--presumably this is documented in his previous anthropology works.

It gets worse. Mimetic rivalry can grow into mimetic contagion, i.e., groups of people competing with other groups. Republicans envy Democrats, and vice versa--which ultimately reduces them both to something twin-like. Tweedledum and Tweedledee is how my Trotskyist friends like to describe them. Mimetic contagion is the source of social conflict, discord, and disorder.

If there is good news here, it's that Satan doesn't really exist--or at least not like a person or an angel. There is not a little devil on your shoulder urging you to do naughty things. What does exist is this inborn, mimetic covetousness that leads us to take sides and hate our neighbors. It is covetousness that results in the other sins described in the ten commandments--murder, adultery, etc.

Satan exists as collective behavior as mimetic contagion--today we'd call him an emergent phenomenon--the product of covetousness.

Yet Satan--described in the Bible as the Prince of this World--has a problem. His power depends on some level of social cohesion. Failing that, everything will end up in nuclear holocaust, and Satan will be dead along with the rest of us. So the disorder and conflict can't get too far out of hand. Satan has to curb his enthusiasm--or as Mr. Girard puts it, loosely quoting the Bible, Satan expels Satan.

How does Satan do that? It's something that Mr. Girard describes as the single victim mechanism, which he again claims is ubiquitous in primitive and pagan practice. We might recognize it as human sacrifice. The archetype example presented by Mr. Girard is the story of Appolonius of Tyana upon his visit to Ephesus. He found the city suffering from a severe "epidemic," though not of a biological kind. Instead it was riven by feuds and discord caused by mimetic contagion. (Spoiler alert--the full story quoted in I See Satan... is much more horrifying than my abbreviated account.)

Appolonius perceives a solution, and fingers a poor beggar as the culprit. "See," he says. "That man there is the cause of your troubles. He should be stoned." He does eventually convince somebody to throw the first stone--after which the stones fall fast and heavy. The beggar is murdered, but because the mob truly believes that he really was the guilty party, the "epidemic" quickly fades away, eventually to be replaced by renewed mimetic contagion. The beggar is a scapegoat.

The mimetic conflicts are all laid upon a single victim--inevitably somebody who has no friends or relatives to defend him or her: beggar, leper, widow, foreigner, etc. They're all ritually killed, one by one, or perhaps several at a time--and as long as the mob believes, it works. Social solidarity is temporarily restored. Satan has expelled Satan.

Sometimes the effect--civic restoration--is so sudden and beneficial that the citizens are deeply grateful to the victim. He or she is posthumously deified, and occasionally even resurrected. Mr. Williams, in the foreword, explains that pagan gods (such as those of Greek mythology) are usually just deified,  resurrected victims.

The Hebrew Bible understood that at least some victims weren't guilty--they were innocent. Joseph--a victim not murdered but instead exiled--was not guilty. Job is set upon from all directions--yet the Bible proclaims his innocence. The Jews have through the ages disproportionately served as victims, and according to Mr. Williams the Psalms are poems sung by innocent victims. (This insight has put the Psalms in a whole new light for me.)

But now consider the Passion--which follows the single victim mechanism almost to the letter. Jesus is both a foreigner and a pain in the ass. Jerusalem is beset with conflict and strife. The mob is convinced that Jesus is the source of their problems--and so are Herod and Pontius Pilate. The latter orders him ritually tortured unto death. "Forgive them," Jesus says, "for they know not what they do." They don't, because if they did the single victim mechanism wouldn't work.

But the disciples knew--and they proclaimed it loud and clear upon Jesus' resurrection (another echo of the pagan myth). Now you may not believe in the resurrection, but what you believe is in this matter irrelevant. There is no doubt that the disciples and the apostle Paul believed in the resurrection, and they proclaimed it far and wide. The resurrection was for them also proof of Jesus' innocence. He didn't call himself a scapegoat, but he picked a much better term: lamb of God. What can be more innocent than a lamb?

The Passion has destroyed the single victim mechanism for all time. Post-Passion, it's been impossible to sacrifice human beings (and increasingly, also animals) because it won't work. Since Jesus, people no longer believe the victim is guilty--instead he or she is innocent! Killing an innocent victim is murder--and it will no longer absolve one of one's sins. Satan can no longer expel Satan. 

Satan has lost his power to expel Satan, but he still exists and still sows havoc--the political polarization in US politics is a case in point. But Jesus has taught us that victims are innocent--far from blaming the victim as the pagans used to do, we now compete to become the most victimized of all victims. Even white males are today becoming victims because of "reverse racism," or "critical race theory." Our world is full of victims, all trying to imitate each other to become the victim to end all victims. "The first shall be last, and the last shall be first." We're in a mimetic competition to be "last."

That is the significance of the Passion for today! I don't think Mr. Girard is wrong.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: The Cult of the Smart
• Mary-Alice Waters' Religious View of History
• Book Review: An Anxious Age

The June 21st Militant

The June 21st issue (pdf) of The Militant gets two things wrong and one thing right--which together makes for an interesting read. (The Militant is published by the Socialist Workers Party--SWP.)

A front page article by Terry Evans entitled Working people worldwide look to fight effects of rising prices leads with this howler.

Food prices and the cost of other necessities for working people are soaring worldwide, highlighting the urgent need for workers to join together to fight for jobs, higher wages and automatic cost-of-living adjustments on our wages and retirement pay. Millions face hunger, especially in the semicolonial world, because under capitalism food is produced and marketed solely to generate the highest profits for the employing class, not to meet the needs of humanity.

The last sentence is completely wrong--of course food is grown to meet the needs of humanity. Otherwise there would be no market for the stuff and the capitalists wouldn't make any money. Capitalists (aka farmers) want to sell as much food as they can to the largest number of people. There is no way that farmers are purposely causing world hunger.

But Mr. Evans is correct that world food prices are rising. That's because there is a global shortage of food, forcing the market price higher. I surmise that shortage is because of China, which is not self-sufficient in food and has had a bad crop year (flooding, swine flu). If you believe Peter Zeihan, China no longer has the workforce necessary to engage in the labor-intensive gardening that maximizes yield per acre, but instead has been forced to mechanize, reducing yields.

The financial fixes Mr. Evans lists will not increase the amount of food available. It will just distort the market and render food distribution inefficient.

He also writes,

In 2020 some 155 million people faced what the U.N. World Food Program euphemistically calls “food insecurity,” a rise of 20 million over the previous year.

This is astonishingly good news! Of a global population of nearly eight billion, fewer than 2% are food insecure. A generation or two ago that number would have been closer to 50%. So much for the notion that capitalism increases poverty. The suggestion that Mr. Evans and his ilk are gonna devise a more efficient method of food distribution is gonzo.

The photo accompanying Mr. Evans' article (below) shows some relatively well-fed Yemenis protesting high food prices. Note that Yemen is in the middle of a brutal civil war--a problem that has nothing to do with global food production or distribution.

(Source)

In a campaign statement by Joanne Kuniansky headlined Fight for workers control of production!, she claims (emphasis mine),

Under capitalist rule, production is organized with no concern for workers’ lives or limbs, on the job or for others living nearby, nor for the soil, air and water being fouled by pollution.

As written, this is just wrong. Of course capitalists have some concern for the welfare of their workers, for otherwise they would all quit or go on strike. More--capitalists are human beings, too, and share the moral and fairness impulses we all have. If she'd phrased it less strongly--too little concern or insufficient concern--then the case is arguable. But in today's environment, with labor shortages looming, especially for skilled labor, it behooves the capitalist to be extra solicitous of his employees' well-being.

Life is full of trade-offs. Any mining or manufacturing activity will incur some risks--both to workers and to the environment. Unlike what Ms. Kuniansky claims, it is impossible to eliminate that risk--only to reduce it at a higher cost. The cost the capitalist is willing to pay depends much more on the consumer than on the capitalist--for if the costs of safety are too high, then high prices make the market too small to justify the enterprise. So workers are more in conflict with consumers than with their bosses--which is why workers' control of production won't solve anything.

One has to note that labor and environmental protections in socialist societies (e.g., former Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela) are awful. It's much better to be a worker in the United States.

An article by Mary Martin, entitled The working-class road forward in tackling crime and cop violence, tries to split the difference between Trotskyist boilerplate and reality. The boilerplate quotes SWP Minneapolis mayoral candidate Doug Nelson:

“Crime is defined by the capitalist rulers to maintain their power and privileges,” Nelson said. “Their laws and the way they’re enforced are designed to keep workers in line and to brand substantial layers of us as criminals, particularly those who are Black or from other oppressed nationalities. To the bosses and landlords in power, all workers are viewed as potentially dangerous. ..."

And this is at least partly true. No doubt the police exist to defend the status quo, which certainly includes capitalist property relations. But it's a stretch to suggest that laws are arbitrary artifacts designed for capitalist convenience--crimes such as murder, theft, and rape have been forbidden since the Ten Commandments, and are fundamental for any society, not just a capitalist one. The last quoted sentence is surely an exaggeration--capitalists are more likely to feel threatened by other capitalists or politicians rather than workers. It is standard Trotsky-talk to claim that cops are always and only agents of the bourgeoisie, and that's precisely what this paragraph claims. 

But the rest of Mr. Nelson's statement belies that narrow view. He says,

“What is of great concern to workers, however, is anti-social violence within working-class communities,” he said. “In addition to the immediate consequences for those affected, it breeds fear and demoralization; it saps workers’ confidence and tears at social solidarity. This in turn feeds into more anti-social behavior and spreads the infection of capitalist dog-eat-dog morality. The rulers’ cops and courts are aimed against us, but it is far better to live under their rule of law than without it, where warlords, gangs and vigilantes fill the gap.

“One of the obvious factors in the recent rise in violent crime has been the systematic withdrawal of police in certain working-class neighborhoods, particularly those with the highest crime rates,” Nelson said. “The effect was no surprise to anyone, least of all the government officials who organized it as part of the rulers’ political responses to the broad popular demonstrations that exploded across the country following the death of Floyd, as well as the unpopular and anti-social rioting and looting. They decided to sacrifice some beat cops responsible for Floyd’s death, and to have the police pull back from many of our communities. ..."

This is reality speaking: the only real alternative to a police force (what the Constitution refers to as a "well-formed militia") is a Hobbesian world of all against all. That's what life is like in today's Yemen, where there really are food shortages. So The Militant, true to its masthead, understands that working people need protection from criminals--as much or even more than folks in wealthier communities. Those who will withdraw the cops from poor neighborhoods are acting as agents for street gangs and the lumpen proletariat.

The progressive wing of the Democratic Party represents all lumpens--both the lumpen proletariat and the closely aligned lumpen intelligentsia. On the other hand, a newspaper that claims to speak in the interests of working people has to realize that Black citizens (95% of whom are honest, upstanding, hardworking people) deserve to have their 911 calls answered.

So I'm down with The Militant on this one. I only wish that they'd drop all the silly Trotsky-talk.

Further Reading:

• Has the SWP Moved Right? Or the Republicans Left?
• Socialist Action Believes American Children Should Freeze to Death
• The Revenge of the Lumpen Proletariat

Electric Cars

So I really liked the article entitled Electric cars: On the road to a ‘green’ future?, authored by Cooper Bard and published in Socialist Resurgence. It has a lot of very useful information, specifically about lithium and lithium mining. Lithium is used in lithium-ion batteries that are the power source for electric cars. The cited references are especially useful. So I recommend it highly.

Lithium is the lightest metal on the periodic table, and therefore ideal for low-weight batteries. It is a common element in the earth's crust, but is widely distributed, existing in most places in only trace amounts. Concentrated ores are rare, found disproportionately in South America (esp. Chile and Bolivia), Australia and China. Accordingly, economically viable mines are in short supply, and there is no reason to think the world's lithium supply will grow rapidly.

As one of Mr. Bard's references points out,

If we would like to have a North American standard of living for everyone in the world – say, 1 car for every 2 people – then we would need about 3.4 billion Nissan Leafs. This would use 32% of the identified resources (all known lithium in the world), or 82% of the reserves (all lithium that is currently economic to produce). Even with widespread recycling, that seems like an unsustainable prospect.

And that's just lithium. Mr. Bard mentions cobalt and nickel. Cobalt is mined mostly in DR Congo, with smaller amounts coming from Canada. Nickel is more widely dispersed:

More than 2.5 million tonnes (t) of nickel per year are estimated to be mined worldwide, with Indonesia (760,000 t), the Philippines (320,000 t), Russia (280,000 t), New Caledonia (200,000 t), Australia (170,000 t) and Canada (150,000 t) being the largest producers as of 2020.

For whatever reason, Mr. Bard doesn't mention copper, which electric motors require in large quantities. Indeed, the best response to governments mandating electric cars is to buy copper futures or copper mining stocks, which have doubled in price over the past 18 months. "Chile was the top producer of copper with at least one-third of the world share followed by the United States, Indonesia and Peru."

The common method of mining lithium involves the selective precipitation of various salts in brine pools. At first the ore is dissolved in a large pool, and as the water evaporates the salts crystallize and precipitate out. One then has a mixture of lithium, manganese and boron salts. These are then dissolved in another brine pool, and are again selectively precipitated out (by varying the pH), enabling the isolation of sufficiently pure lithium salts. Turning lithium salts into metallic lithium requires copious amounts of electricity, in a manner similar to aluminum production. Any general chemistry student who did qualitative analysis in a lab will understand the basic principles.

Even if you didn't follow all of that, the bottom line is that mining lithium requires lots of water, and is a process that takes months or even years to complete. The waste products include sulfuric and hydrochloric acid, along with heavy metal byproducts. None of this is good for the local groundwater.

So Mr. Bard is quite right: lithium mining is not good for the environment. And more--there is not enough lithium out there to electrify our transportation system. Similar issues arise in mining the other necessary metals. Copper, for example, is extracted in huge, open pit mines, leaving enormous tailings in their wake. Fracking is a much cleaner, cheaper and less destructive way of producing energy.

I'll take issue with Mr. Bard's description of the Thacker Pass mine in Nevada. He writes,

Clay dug up from what is essentially an exploded mountain is mixed with 5800 tons sulfuric acid a day. The process will require over 3200 gallons of water every minute. The site, operated by Lithium Americas, will generate over 350 cubic yards of mining waste laced with the sulfuric acid [1]. Groundwater may also be contaminated with toxic materials. Anyone who declares this an environmentally safe solution has an odd perspective on environmentalism!

I won't argue with the last sentence, but the rest is misleading. The water is not required by the minute, but rather while setting up the brine pools, i.e., every few months. And similarly for sulfuric acid. Further, there is no groundwater at Thacker Pass--if you've traveled in Nevada you know the place is dry as a bone.

He also writes,

[The Thacker Pass] mine has received the ire both of local ranchers, who have filed lawsuits, and the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribes, who have delivered petitions and protested the site, as well as organized a 273-mile-long prayer run to promote awareness.

The Ft. McDermitt reservation has 341 inhabitants, and is located about 50 road miles away from the mine. It is not clear to me how the mine will in any way affect the tribe. I also don't see why that small population should have veto power over an enterprise of national significance.

But I agree with Mr. Bard that electrifying our transportation system is not a solution to any environmental crisis. I'll suggest that fossil fuels are much better, cheaper and cleaner.

Instead of fossil fuels, Mr. Bard's suggestion is that we revert to "mass transit," i.e., a 19th century solution to a 21st century problem. He writes,

One bus—whether diesel, hybrid, or electric—can efficiently transport 50 people. A train or tram connected to a renewable city electric grid will provide clean transit to thousands of people over the course of a year. Mass transit has the dual advantage of being both more accessible (and more equitable) and more efficient. Pound for pound, trains, trams, and buses require less and do more.

Which is weird, because the buses in my hometown rarely carry more than half a dozen passengers at a time. Often I see them driving around completely empty. Trams famously travel at 19 miles per hour. On current ridership, there is no way that so-called "mass transit" is more energy efficient than private cars.

More, it's really hard to get to work on mass transit. Randall O'Toole writes,

It doesn’t reach many jobs: The University of Minnesota’s Accessibility Observatory estimates that a typical resident of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas can reach more than twice as many jobs in a 20-minute auto drive than a 60-minute transit ride. Auto users can reach 12 times as many jobs in 60 minutes up to 67 times as many jobs in 10 minutes as transit users.

Mr. Bard implicitly recognizes that--he phrases transit's advantage as "pound for pound." But surely, "minute for minute" is a much better comparison, and on that "mass transit" loses big time. Mr. Bard apparently assigns no value to people's time.

I believe Larry Ellison dinged rail travel something like this:

A train starts from a place you don't want to start from, leaving at a time you don't want to go, and takes you to a place you don't want to be at, arriving at a time when you don't want to get there. And after all of that you have to get into a car to drive to your destination.

Mass transit works in densely populated cities, e.g., New York. But most Americans don't live that way, and don't want to live that way. Mass transit doesn't work for suburban or rural areas.

Just imagine if the indigenous tribe Mr. Bard otherwise so champions were all forced to wait around for buses. They wouldn't be happy. 

Further Reading:

• Keith Leslie's International Report
• Louis Proyect and the More Poverty Solution
• Jeff Mackler Interviewed by Paul Duddridge