In 2010, my friend and mentor Steve Moses asked me a question that jolted me. “What do you want?” he asked. Simple, direct, honest. It appeared like a surprising monolith upon the landscape of my vocational discernment and the looming question of what I (and my wife) would do upon the conclusion of our one-year residency with Service Over Self in Memphis.
That was 14 years ago. Since then, desire has stayed in the foreground, a more recognizable, if not at times uncomfortable, companion. Sure, desire was always there. But Steve’s question was one of those moments of clarity when I had to stare desire in the face, to name it in the presence of another–the presence of an empathetic, encouraging listener, who wasn’t asking out of self-interest, self-protection, fear, distrust, envy, or manipulation, or control. Steve wasn’t asking about ephemeral desires; he asked as a cartographer of the soul, helping chart the rugged, confusing terrain of my being. This wasn’t an everyday McDonald’s “What do you want today?” moment, but an existential collision with my very self. What do I want? What do I want? What do I want? What do I want? I wasn’t really sure.
Steve’s question echoed down the corridors of history from the compassionate query that fell from the lips of Jesus of Nazareth. A man named Bartimaeus, blind, poor, and beleaguered, once called out, “Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me!” Ever full of the unexpected in his responses to the attention and appeals of women and men around him, Jesus asked Bart, “What do you want me to do for you?” More pointedly, he was asking Bart to honestly face his deepest longings, to be candid, to shuck pretense–”What do you want, Bart?” Bart had to name desire that day in the presence of the One who sees, trusting that he not only sees but cares; not only sees and cares, but can and will do something merciful and good in response to Bart’s named desire.
“I want to see,” responded Bart. And, so it was.
If you’re like me, you probably don’t have a story quite like this in your knapsack of life experiences. Many of us do not have “I once was blind, but now I see” moments of lucid transformation. Perhaps you have had a lightning flash of grace that marked you; if so, I rejoice with you! But many of us may scoff at Bart’s mythical tale, dismiss it with historical snobbery, or recoil in pain because we haven’t experienced the goodness of God for our moment of blindness, trauma, confusion, addiction, depression, loneliness…
It can be painful to gaze at this reality, because we are all creatures of desire. But we each have our own lion’s share of desire run amuck, desire unanswered, or desire disordered. Desire; it’s central to what it means to be human. We are not simply sentient sacks of chemicals, instinctual animals, thinking things, or “brains on a stick,” as James K.A. writes in You Are What You Love–we are desiring beings. Sure, the lines between animal desire and human desire can get blurry, like when we get hangry. But no animal–and no angel either—is crowned with the dignity and honor as co-rulers and partners with God in stewarding, cultivating, and blessing the earth with shalom and fruitfulness. Our desire, and the associated freedom of naming and following desire, might be an “intolerable compliment,” as C.S. Lewis suggests, but desire is inescapable.
So, what do we do about it?
Perhaps no one in recent years has called to attention the role of desire more than the 20th century historian, social theorist, literary critic, and philosophical anthropologist René Girard. His writing and ideas may be en vogue in certain spaces these days, but I was among the uninitiated until my friend JR Woodward introduced me to Girard’s ideas a handful of years ago. JR has since published The Scandal of Leadership–a careful, prophetic, robust diagnosis and treatment of the problem of domineering leadership and imitation of the Powers in today’s church–that draws significantly from the stream of Girard’s sweeping theory of mimesis, or mimetic desire. JR’s book has been endorsed and well-received by Girardian scholars, lending a welcome gravitas to his interpretations and applications of Girard. His concluding section on a proposed “remedy” for the epidemic of domineering leadership is beautifully laid out. No spoilers, you’ll have to read it. I heartily commend it to you!
Someone has said that what gravity is to physics, mimetic desire is to psychology. There’s an inescapable significance to desire–specifically mimetic desire–that tugs on our souls. I’m a Girardian novice, but if I understand correctly, his ideas were greatly influenced by a few primary sources, namely The Golden Bough by James Frazer (a study of ancient and pagan myths, rites, rituals), the literature of Feodor Dostoevsky, and the Gospel narratives.
Girard had a profound conversion journey to the Christian faith during his academic tenure. First, an intellectual conversion in which he realized that the Christian myth was the myth to end all myths, or a fulfillment of the ancient myths of crucified and resurrected kings, in which Christ was the only truly innocent victim (scapegoat) who died for the sins of the people thereby definitely defeating and undermining humanity’s violence and mimetic rivalry. Girard then underwent a conversion of faith that marked the remainder of his life in academia. If I’m not mistaken, C.S. Lewis experienced a similar conversion transition, spelled out in his autobiography Surprised by Joy.
Girard proposes that we gain our desires through mimesis, or imitation. We imitate the desires of our models. This imitation can lead to the good, through positive mimesis, or to the bad, through rivalry and competition giving birth to violence and scapegoating. This mimetic cycle is the foundation of good literature, says Girard, who highlights how this mimetic cycle leads to the founding murder (Cain killing Abel) and all scapegoating violence in history in which families, tribes, communities, religions, and nations have identified a scapegoat victim to absorb their violent rivalry and guilt. Jesus, the model of desire who imitated the good desires of the Father through the Spirit, was the final and truly innocent scapegoat, the victim slain by way of mimetic rivalry. Thus, Christ ended violence and mimetic rivalry, opening the way for the people of God to live with forgiveness and love, not rivalry and competition.
Back to desire, what this says to me is that “my” desires are not wholly original to me. Rather, I imitate the desires of my models. So, underneath the question of “What do I want?” are these questions: “Who am I imitating?” and “What are the desires of my models?”
We come into the world looking for a face. Robyn Gobbel, KJ Ramsey, Curt Thompson, Jim Wilder and other’s work have illuminated this truth to me, vis-à-vis the growing body of neuroscientific understanding of our brain’s attachment wiring and interpersonal neurobiology networks. We look for our mother’s face, we attune, we attach, we mirror, we imitate. We take in a world of faces and desires. Are we desired? Are we seen? Are we safe? Are we soothed? Are we secure?
When the answer that comes back is “No,” our attachment wiring begins to go off the rails (as I understand it), with desires in tow. Long before Smith, Thompson, Girard, or Dostoevsky, we find the writing of other doctors of desire, like King David, the prophet Jeremiah, the Apostle Paul, Bishop Augustine of Hippo and Saint Ignatius of Loyola (I realize that this post is featuring primarily men as literary influences in the desire space. This is a candid acknowledgement of my “desire” to deepen my wisdom on mimesis according to the perspectives of women), who call to attention the good of desire and the disordering of desire at work in the underground of our souls and societies. The antecedents of disordered desire are complex, and we will not soon fill up the pages to be written on the subject.
But we need to pay attention to what we are paying attention to. Today we’ve built ourselves into a factory of desire, manufacturing imitation possibilities with unprecedented scale. This architecture of desire, built from the stones of Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, ads, and personalized marketing algorithms endlessly provide us with new models and new desires to imitate. Disordered desires beware.
What this highlights is a fascinating interplay between technology and mimesis (imitation). There is much to explore here. Marshall McLuhan, the famed 20th century media theorist, observed that all of our technologies are extensions/enhancements of human senses and human strength. The gas pedal on our car extends and enhances the foot. The shovel extends and enhances the hand. The telephone extends and enhances the ear. So and so forth. These technologies in some way then imitate human senses and become models and mechanisms of desire. I suppose if I were digging in my yard with my hands and looked over and saw my neighbor using this new-fangled shovel, I would want that, would I not? Especially if my neighbor was a model to me. Perhaps his name is Jones, I don’t know. Imagine then if we created a technology that is not only an extension of the hand, but also an extension of a multitude of human senses. Perhaps we called it, I don’t know, a smartphone? And on this smartphone were touch sensitive portals into other neighbor’s workplaces, vacations, relationships, homes, kitchens, bedrooms…What might that do to our mimetic desire?
Before the iGods of Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook rose to their celestial thrones in the social imaginary, I remember way back in the 1900s when I was a child, sitting crisscross-applesauce on the brown shag carpet, plopped comfortably in front of the television. In the 80s, I adored pretty much everything on PBS. The faces and narratives I encountered in Mister Rogers, Sesame Street, Captain Kangaroo, Reading Rainbow, This Old House, and Bob Ross all took their own places as distant models of desire. I had the near models - mom, dad, brothers, sister, grandparents - but these distant models of desire were not inconsequential. I see their color in the mosaic of my desires to this day.
I think there is good work to be done exploring and harmonizing McLuhan and Girard’s ideas for our current AI/digital/tech economy. Maybe I’ll explore this road further. I think Ivan Illich and Albert Borgmann might have some words for us.
In sum, all of this has me curious about the following:
–What are the thin desires in my life? The ephemeral, flighty desires that change with the winds?
–What are my thick desires? The sturdy, durable ones that are firmly established in my own architecture of desire? Can they be changed? Can they be honored? Which ones have I ignored?
–What are the disordered desires that lead me astray?
–What desires am I passing along to others? Or, who am I a model to?
–-Who were the models of desire in my childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and present day?
–Are there new models of desire I want to imitate?
–How are technology and my form/habit/rule of life forming me (my desires and loves) for good or for ill?
–What kind of misery tax am I paying to keep up with desires I've been handed that I don’t need?
–Is Jesus a model of desire in my life? Do my actions bear this out?
–What are the limits or gaps of mimetic theory, and how does mimesis interplay with what we know of anthropology, interpersonal neurobiology, and technology?
I believe wholeheartedly that desire is a good thing, and that imitation is meant to be a superpower to bring about beauty, justice, and shalom on the earth as it is in heaven. I also know that desire can and does run off the rails, leading us and those who model/imitate us astray. God help us see the difference.
Shalom,
Jonathan