My sister sent me a Thank You card last week, a gesture of gratitude for my help hanging a ceiling fan on her porch. She is very good about that sort of thing, acknowledging kindness received and reciprocating. It is one of her many, many lovable traits. She cooks well too, hosts great parties, and always brings a complete beach kit (chairs, umbrellas, blankets, towels, snacks) to Rehoboth.
If you lack a sister like mine do yourself a favor and get one pronto.
My Sister the Anti-Girard
So what have Sis and her Thank You cards to do with Rene Girard, a sort of modern day apocalyptic prophet of doom who illustrates the scapegoating mechanism and illuminates the quick and easy path that leads from a desire to imitate your neighbor to a desire for vengeance?
Sis and her card are a kind of anti-Girard anti-vengeance.
Reciprocal escalation is the order of the day and always has been, says Girard. Nothing feels more natural that tit-for-tat one-upsmanship because nothing is more natural than getting carried away ala Stan Jablonski’s ‘let’s do it to them before they do it to us,’ for you Hill Street Blues fans.
All the cool kids graduated high school during the Hill Street Blues era.
Vengeance is reciprocal violence. It does not matter who started it (and who can say, really?). What matters is that I’m going to end it once and for all by … Hmm. That sounds an awful lot like the beginning of the next cycle of violence.
An act opposite vengeance, an act of anti-vengeance, can end vengeance.
Anti-Vengeance
Vengeance has two opposites: nonreciprocal violence and reciprocal kindness. Nonreciprocal violence has a name: scapegoating. Scapegoating is the act of putting all the blame on one person, then expelling them. Successful scapegoating restores peace for a while. The proof is in the pudding. The plague ended when the good people of Thebes put out Oedipus’s eyes, for example.
Don’t buy it? How about the scout troop that got so much happier when we forced out the one bad scoutmaster? Or the project that suddenly worked after we fired tha troublemaker? Or the tennis team that won a tournament when we drove out the gossiper, the one we all like to talk about?
Reciprocal kindness has a name too: gifting.
Gifting
How do gifting, scapegoating, and vengeance relate? Three concepts are two more than I can keep straight at once, so let’s make a chart.
| Violence | Kindness | |
| Reciprocal | Vengeance | Gifting |
| Non-reciprocal | Scapegoating |
Now this, a 2×2 table, I can understand! I used to understand 3×3 tables. Growing old hurts.
The differences illuminated by the chart above are not the only differences though. The time-orientation differs too. Vengeance looks to the past: it is payback for a wrong already done. Scapegoating also looks ahead: it anticipates peace restored once the baddie is outed.
Gifting looks ahead too: it anticipates a future good from the one who receives. It sets the stage for the next round of giving, if you will. It differs from scapegoating in this important way, that scapegoating counts on the benefit of doing something to someone while gifting looks forward to the benefit of doing something for someone. If you do not understand the difference between doing to and doing for, wait until someone annoys the crap out of you and claims they ‘wanted to do something nice for you.’
Kindness is hard. Gifting makes it easier. I helped sis. She sent a card. Future acts of kindness are sure to sprout.
The Mimetic Brother
I rarely wonder how I imitate my sister or even whether I ought to. And that’s really odd because 1) I know for a fact that everyone imitates the people they see and we see each other regularly, and 2) she has many good qualities. But now, looking at that chart … I better get off my butt an act all mimetic.
I ought to imitate my sister. She is a Thank You card champ; I am a bench warmer. She has better hair too. I just wish I could imitate that! Maybe she will sell me some.
My sister is hosting a crab feast in about a month. She invited me. Sweet! I love crabs! Four or five months hence her home will be the site of Washington D.C.’s best chili cook off, and I’m pretty sure she will invite me to that too.
And all I have to do to stay on the invite list is send her a Thank You card. This year I will.