Learning to Love in the Anthropocene (4)
Is That All There Is: Mimetic Desire?
Admit it! You’re flattered when two guys compete — actually fight! — over you. Yes, you’re scared (in a thrilling kind of way), but also flattered. What could be more ego-gratifying and validating than having handsome, well-off guys coming to blows over which one of them gets to fuck you? That’s what evolutionary biology is all about, isn’t it? Are muscled, flexing men really any different from rutting stags with antlers flashing, clashing?
Only nowadays, instead of muscles, money is what’s mostly flexed. And you, the object of desire, can be bought. Can’t you? You don’t come cheap, of course. The more expensive your requirements — designer wardrobe, fancy sports car, second home, and lots and lots of jewelry— the more desirable, in fact, you become.
Making guys jealous is a girly trick as old as time. And if enough guys desire you, their longing becomes aspirational. That’s the trendy word for upwardly-mobile desire. Which can be expensive. And which brings me to the unlikely subject of anthropological philosophy and the French thinker René Noël Théophile Girard, who believed:
All human desires are borrowed from other people. Mimetic desire, Girard called it. A man desires me only because other men desire me. This in turn leads to mimetic rivalry, the origin of all conflict and violence.
So it was that, 5,000 years ago, my imaginary lover Ötzi, while romantically holding my hand, was shot in the back with an arrow. As I cradled and watched my Ötzi bleed to death there in the snowy Alpine pass, the man who had shot him hovered over me — then grabbed me and carried me away. That scenario fits exactly with researchers’ latest theories about how in fact Ötzi died.
For those of you unfamiliar with the story, Ötzi is the name given to the almost perfectly preserved Neolithic man discovered frozen in an Italian Alpine glacier not so many year ago. Had it not been for the glacier’s melting, the frozen corpse would not have been discovered. Which brings to the next unlikely subject of climate change:
The Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh, in a recent speech, asserts that global warming is an inevitable consequence of mimetic desire and rivalry:
Ultimately [mimetic desire] would bring into being our own era of globalization — a homogenization of desire on a scale never before seen, extending across the planet and into the deepest reaches of the human soul….Despite the rise in the global standard of living and the increasing accessibility of these desired goods, the world has not attained some sort of utopian state of harmony and prosperity…. Rather, the intimate nature of the connection forged by these commodities has only intensified and deepened the resentment, anger and envy.
On that depressing note, I’ll lapse back into the fantasy of having Ötzi as my lover in a world not yet destroyed by human desire. For the origins of that fantasy, I share my secrets here:
