We are awash in words and images from marketers, politicians, pop stars, and online outrage merchants, all trying — and often succeeding — to manipulate human desires for their purposes. Why does this work? In the 20th century, an innovative Catholic thinker argued that the desire to imitate one another is what drives us, in areas of life ranging from friendship to war and peace. How do we escape this trap, and pursue moral formation that helps us want the right things?

Luke Burgis will join us to investigate how our desires are formed, the subject of his book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. Praised by such diverse thinkers as Jonathan Haidt, Adam Grant, Tyler Cowan, and Arthur Brooks, Burgis explores philosopher René Girard’s powerful argument, and ways we can counteract the lure of imitation in our society and ourselves.

We held an Online Conversation with Luke Burgis on July 19 to discuss why we want what we want.

Thank you to our co-hosts, the Archbridge Institute and the Ciocca Center, for their support of this event!

Online Conversation | Luke Burgis | July 19, 2024

Tom Walsh: Thank you for joining us. Thank you for hanging in there. We’re going to have a fascinating Online Conversation today with Luke Burgess on the topic “Why We Want What We Want.” I’d like to thank our co-hosts for today, the Archbridge Institute and the Ciocca Center at Catholic University of America. We appreciate your willingness to partner with us on this. And we’re so delighted to have over 1,000 of you who are joining us today. We want to especially welcome our 75 first-time registrants and a hundred or perhaps more international guests from at least 25 different countries, from Australia to Uganda and Indonesia to Italy. Thank you so much for joining us across the miles and the time zones. And please tell us in the Q&A box how you heard about us—actually, in the chat box, do that.

And if you’re one of the many first-time guests that we have today and are new to the work of the Trinity Forum, just a note that what we try to do is to provide a space to engage the big questions of life in the context of faith, and to offer programs like this one to do so and to help us all come to better know the Author of the answers. And we hope you’ll get a taste of that from today’s conversation.

Well, it’s been said that if you tell me what you want, I can tell you who you are. What we want shapes our character, our lives, and our future. It also shapes those around us. But what we want and why we want it isn’t always straightforward. And if we’re honest, almost all of us have realized that we’ve chased, perhaps even obtained, a desire that has disappointed, deceived, or distracted us from that which is far more valuable.

In his fascinating book Wanting, our guest today draws on the work of the late Stanford scholar René Girard to argue that our desires are rarely original or independent, but instead mimetic. That is, we imitate others in our desires, wanting what we want because we think others want it. He shows how such imitation affects everything from the formation of our identities to the power and profitability of social media and the viciousness of office politics, on the one hand, or neighborhood conflict on the other hand. Luke helps us to see the ways in which our learned tendency to want what those around us want often turns friends and neighbors into rivals, driving us to compete and fight for the same goods, even when those goods fail to satisfy. And Luke draws on his experience both as an entrepreneur and a student of philosophy and theology to argue that learning to understand why we want what we want is essential to wanting more and better, and that desiring wisely and well is essential to the good life.

Luke is a serial entrepreneur, as he describes himself, who has founded and led multiple companies and currently serves as the Entrepreneur in Residence and Director of Programs at the Ciocca Center for Principles of Entrepreneurship at Catholic University of America. He’s also the founder and director of Fourth Wall Ventures, an incubator for people and companies that contribute to the formation of a healthy human ecology. And as we’ve mentioned, he’s the author of the book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life.

Luke, you’re very welcome.

Luke Burgis: Tom. Thanks for having me here. I will I’ll try to forget that there’s that many people watching and listening. That’s an amazing community and it’s good to be with you.

Tom Walsh: Thanks for joining us. Well, we’ll start at the beginning. What made you want to write a book? It’s always helpful to hear the origin story. And it seems like you have a particularly interesting one, including walking away from studying theology in Rome. What brought you here?

Luke Burgis: Well, I think my own sinfulness is really the start of that story. And my own disordered desires, to borrow a phrase from Augustine, the way that he would frame it. I was kind of like the woman at the well, is the way that I would describe my encounter with Gerard. It was like, “come and see a man who’s told me everything that I’ve ever done in my life.” That’s kind of what it felt like reading René Gerard for the first time. He took me on this journey of my memory, seeing the way that the Holy Spirit had worked in my life, seeing the way that I had made decisions in my life, going back to the time when I was a child, up through decisions like where I chose to go to college, the kind of career that I wanted. The ways that my desires changed over time, I didn’t really understand. I felt like a person that had tremendous whiplash. I would be really excited and fired up about one thing—my college major, a vacation, a career, an internship—and then I would lose the fire that I had for that desire.

So, in a sense, Girard’s work, took me on this really Augustinian journey, like The Confessions, of seeing what was behind some of these movements of desire in my early life. And what I mean by that is that his fundamental insight, which you described very well in the introduction, is the idea of mimetic desire. And that is our very desires are social. We look to other people, models, in our lives from time to time that influence what it is that we want. And often we’re not aware of who those models are. And I went pretty much my whole life until my encounter with Gerard believing, as many people in our modern world do, that my desires were completely a product of my autonomous, imperial self. I just generated them ex nihilo or something like that. And I got very wrapped up in them. They became my identity. So if I wanted something that therefore that must be the totality of sort of who I am. And the thing that was the object of my desire took on this really outsized importance. And looking back, I would probably call it an idol, whether it was people or things or ideas about things that I thought would make me happy.

So, you know, I wrote the book because I wanted to introduce people to a thinker that was so important in my life that I think would help illuminate or give them a lens to look at their own history, at their own lives, and the way that we make choices. And then the very practical reason that I wrote the book was I realized that Gerard had really been confined to the academy. And there are lots of people grappling with Gerard, but he hadn’t really been introduced to the general public in a way that I thought was satisfying. He became very popular in the Silicon Valley tech circles that I cut my teeth in, which I’m very familiar with. But I really didn’t want him to be confined to the kind of tech world where, you know, you look at Gerard to find out how to make sense of crypto. For me, Gerard was a profoundly spiritual thinker to stumble on and helped me really understand the way that God had been working in my life from a very young age.

Tom Walsh: Thank you, Luke. I think the motivations you’re describing will resonate quite a bit with our audience. And so it’s really great to have you here, and we look forward to delving deeper into some of these topics. And just to mention one name that you mentioned, you mentioned Saint Augustine, and some of Gerard’s thought bears resemblance to Augustine and his ordo amoris, the idea that virtue and a life well-lived depends on the proper ordering of our loves. So in your study of Gerard, do you draw a distinction between Augustine’s loves and Gerard’s desires? How do they relate to each other? What would the two of them say to each other were they at a dinner party together?

Luke Burgis: Yeah, well, I’d love to hear that conversation. That’d be fascinating. Maybe we can have ChatGPT recreate that for us or something. But what I would say is that Gerard is an Augustinian really at heart. I believe he’s even referred to himself in that way at one point. And I think he would say that desires fall on a spectrum and that love is the highest form of desire, and that desire can be purified and desire can evolve. So love is the highest form of desire, right? And the ordo amoris sort of comes into this discussion because there’s a subjective component to desire, but there’s also an objective side to desire. So there are things that I can understand that I should want to want, to put it one way, but maybe my will is not moved, or I don’t desire what I know in my heart and in my head to be true.

To give you an example of this, an example of how my ordo amoris was, frankly, realigned over the last few years, is when my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease a few years ago. And this was right around the time when my book came out. I had just gotten married, and I was probably as busy as I’ve ever been in my entire life. And I took over full-time care of my father. But the order of my loves, I sensed, when I took on that responsibility when my mom passed away, were not necessarily ordered to being a caregiver. I was terrified of it. I didn’t think that I had time. I love my dad very much, but it was a responsibility that I saw and knew intellectually that I had to take on. But the work of my desire, the ordering of my loves, needed to change over the course of the next year. The way that I spent my time, the way that I spent my money, all of those things needed to change. And I had some very good models in my life that helped model what being a good caregiver means. We ended up having to move. We had to make a lot of changes in our life, and it was just a very concrete way that the ordo amoris in my life became very apparent to me.

And I had what I call thin desires. And by “thin” I mean highly mimetic desires for certain things that, at the end of the day, are not that important. And a thin desire is kind of fleeting. You get it, and it’s here today and tomorrow it might not seem that important again, like, you know, making a best-seller list for my book or something like that. And then when something happens, like somebody comes into your life that—you have a child or you have a parent that needs caregiving—it throws into relief what that desire means in the bigger picture, our relationship with God, our relationship with our families.

And I think Gerard would say that the mimetic desire finds its highest expression in wanting what God wants and somehow aligning our desires with what God wants in our lives. And if we’re attentive, we can usually gain an understanding through good discernment of what that is.

Tom Walsh: Understood. I’m happy to report that Cherie Harder, our president, has now got her technology working and is going to step in. So let me hand it off to you, Cherie, to ask Luke another question. You’re very welcome. It’s great to see you.

Cherie Harder: Well, Tom, thank you so much. And do stand by just in case there’s some audio issues. And thank you, Luke, and thank you to all of you watching for your patience. We’ve done 110 of these and never before have we had this particular problem. So just appreciate your grace and forbearance as we get it all sorted out. Luke, also thanks for rolling with it. Just really appreciate your flexibility with all this.

Luke Burgis: You’re very welcome. No problem. That was a very minor blip on the radar. We made everybody wait like it was a rock concert or something.

Cherie Harder: Well, I’ve been bummed because I’ve been really looking forward to this conversation too. To be locked out by technology was something crazy. But I know you were in good hands with Tom, so I’ve been listening to the last few questions that Tom has asked. And one of the things that comes to mind is, I’d love to hear your thoughts on, you know, is mimesis necessarily a bad thing? And also kind of related to that, is there a way that our natural desires or our true desires can actually save us from some of the mimetic dangers? And one of the reasons why I asked this is I’m thinking about this interesting line in The Screwtape Letters, where C.S. Lewis kind of intuited some of this, not nearly as explicitly or comprehensively as Gerard, but there’s a line in there where Screwtape basically counsels his nephew to essentially try to make people, he says, “abandon the people or food or books that he really likes in favor of the ‘best’ people or the ‘right’ food or the ‘important’ books.” And he said, “I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions.” And so I’m kind of curious, like, can those natural desires, like for tripe or onions or other stinky foods, actually save us in some ways from memesis?

Luke Burgis: I think the answer is absolutely yes. You know, it’s funny, how often have I watched a movie or read a book that I really like, and then I start to second-guess myself when I start to see what everybody else thinks about it. So that’s a perfect example of mimesis. Like, let me see what the, you know, the New York Times had to say about this thing before I decide to speak about it in public. I think that, and I was describing the situation with my father, because I think that’s another really important example of how these incarnational experiences shape and affect our desires and can actually bring us back and ground us in what’s truly important, in what I call the thick desires, those desires that will ultimately satiate us.

And you know Augustine’s famous line, “our hearts are restless until they rest in thee,” means that desire is, by its very nature, transcendent. It is directing us towards something or someone that is not fully of this world. There’s nothing in this world that can fully satiate our desires. Kind of goes back to C.S. Lewis’s argument for the existence of God is argument by desire, that a creature would not be created with desires that could not somehow be satisfied. But our desires are always pointing us towards someone or something good, true, and beautiful—if we follow them to the end. And that’s, I think, where we can get lost. Gerard said that all desire is fundamentally a desire for Being. God being Being itself. So when Gerard makes that statement, he is talking about the teleological end of desire. 

And I think it’s a mistake to look at our desires with the Manichean instinct that we have to label them good or bad. You know, our desires are something that we should examine very carefully and ask, well, where is this leading for me? Even our sinful desires, like, what do I really want? What’s at the end there? Is it, you know, a desire for communion that I am satisfying in sinful ways? Or whatever it may be. So I think it’s important for us to understand the mystery and the complexity of desire. 

And Gerard looked at it. He used the word “mystery” many times as he looked at human desire. And, you know, we are desiring creatures, and we’re the only creatures that seem to not know what it is that we want, which is why we look to other people. But the beauty is that other people are the ones that mediate our desires to us on our pathway to God. So I look back at my own life, and I look at people that played a role in helping me discern my own vocation. People influenced me in negative ways, but also very positive ways. And they were, in some sense, pointing me to what was in store for me next. And I think understanding that we live in time and we’re on this journey helps put it into perspective for us that, you know, our desires are something that play out in time.

Cherie Harder: Yeah. You know, I’d also really like to ask you about both literature and liturgy, in that, you know, it’s long been an assumption of the Church, really embedded in almost any character formation initiative or bit of literature, that certainly the people around us affect us. And there’s the old saying, like, “Show me your five closest friends and I’ll show you who you are.” But in addition to that, there are the models we see in literature, but there’s also habits and practices, what we give our attention to, what we give our time to. And the Church, of course, has cultivated liturgies, embodied practices that help shape and form not only our loves, but presumably our desires and wants. And we’d love to hear you talk a little bit about how both the models we get in literature, but also our liturgies, our embodied practices, affect our wants and how that relates to mimesis.

Luke Burgis: Sure. So literature is a bit different than liturgy. So I think they affect us in very different ways. So the most famous example of mimetic desire in all of literature, in my view, is Don Quixote. Right? Cervantes’ Don Quixote. The entire story starts with him reading this book about a fictional character, and immediately drops everything and sets out to sort of become like that character. So we commune with the things that we read, and we have to be careful because even fictional characters can affect and shape our desires.

Liturgy, I think, is different. And to your point, it’s embodied habits and practices. In my view, we live in a relatively Gnostic age, hyper-intellectual, you know, I think exemplified by what I call the podcast industrial complex and this kind of constant feeling that if we just know this one more thing—salvation by knowledge—if we just know this one more thing about this problem that we have, then we’ll be able to solve it and everything will be all right. But knowing intellectually alone is different than wanting. And the liturgy, everything about the liturgy forms us to be other-directed, to learn how to make a gift of ourselves. I mean, if you think about the very act— the Sabbath itself, the idea of honoring the Sabbath is part of the ordo amoris. It’s set apart. But then the act of being part of liturgy profoundly shapes who we are and our personalities.

One of my favorite, favorite books written by a Christian author is called Liturgy and Personality by Dietrich von Hildebrand, and he just goes through liturgical practices and talks about how what we do as part of the liturgy— for instance, we stand shoulder to shoulder with many people that we don’t even know. And we’re profoundly vulnerable, right? Confessing our own sinfulness shoulder to shoulder with strangers. Where else do we do that?  We look, in my case, I’m thinking of the Catholic Mass, that I’m looking at the sacrifice of the mass and the cross and the crucifix, constantly reminding me of what my disordered desires can do, sinful desires can do. So the memory is a really important part of liturgy. We tend to forget very quickly what our disordered desires result in, and the consequences of those desires.

But the liturgy is getting out of ourselves. You know, we learn transcendence. We learn how to make a gift of our self. And the habits that we form in the liturgy requires humility. It requires reverence. It requires patience. You know, as part of the liturgy, built into it, there’s anticipation, there is preparing, there is fulfillment, and then there is gratitude. And you just think about what that does to shape a person and shape our lives, that is also shaping our desires.

So I love talking about liturgy in relation to Girard, who took liturgy very, very seriously, because it gets us out of our heads a bit when we’re talking about mimetic desire, which can get very heady.

Cherie Harder: Yeah, I can imagine. There’s so much to ask you about that. But just going back to literature and the models for a second. One of the things that you advise, which makes perfect sense, is being very intentional about the models in our life, choosing them wisely and well. And I’m curious, who have you chosen as models for your own life? How do you select them and what difference do you think it made?

Luke Burgis: One of the most important models in my life that completely changed the course of my entire life was a very holy priest that I met when I was living in Las Vegas, Nevada, in the heart of my startup days. I was trying to run three separate companies at the same time. I was incredibly distracted. And through a friend of a friend, I met a priest who modeled virtue to me, who modeled holiness. He became a hiking partner to me, and really introduced me, reintroduced me, to the Christian life. And I eventually walked away from my companies and burned my ships behind me and entered seminary formation for five years, which was really the pivotal point in my entire life. And he’s somebody that I’m still very much in touch with to this day, even though I’m not a priest. But he, at that point in my life, was the right person to model something to me that I pursued.

And then many other people have come into my life since then. And I have a constellation of people that I would call models. My colleague Andreas Widmer, kind of part of what we teach at Catholic University is to kind of have a board of directors. But these are not necessarily people with professional competence. I like to think of these people that I intentionally surround myself with as people who want things that I want to want or would like to want more. And we normally don’t think about relationships or friendships in that way, in terms of desires. We talk about role models, but modeling a role is different than modeling a desire. And I think if we switch our thinking a little bit to desires— like this person desires to care for the poor. I want to be a little bit more like that. That’s probably a good person to have in our life.

Cherie Harder: Yeah. That’s great. I’m curious about a really interesting point you made in your book that essentially compared the culture wars that have affected our country for the last, well, several decades to a mimetic rivalry. We’re essentially taking secular culture as a mimetic rival. And you said in many ways it’s one giant mimetic rivalry with many different faces. And would be curious how it is that you see it that way? And if we are in fact locked into a mimetic rivalry that we know as the culture wars, how do we get out?

Luke Burgis: Hmm. I don’t think there’s a way out of it without a spiritual transformation. So the dark side of Girard is, the natural consequence of being mimetic, especially without knowing it and lacking a transcendent model, as many, many in our culture have turned away from God, have turned away from Christ, they have to replace that model with something. And often that is replaced with a model in the world of politics or where it just becomes everything, becomes all in all. And I think calling attention to the silliness and pettiness sometimes of tit-for-tat mimetic rivalry is the first step in realizing that you’re caught in it.

My very introduction to Girard was when I was in seminary, and there was just a lot of rivalry going on inside of the seminary. Can you believe that? Even in a seminary? There was a lot of petty mimetic rivalry and I was caught up in it. It was depressing me. I thought, jeez, I thought I came here to be with a bunch of holy guys and to become a priest. And I was on a silent retreat, and I went to my spiritual director on that silent retreat. And I went to him and probably blamed ten different people for the problems in the seminary. You know, we use scapegoats to deflect blame and guilt, without acknowledging our own role in that. And throughout that entire five-day, week-long, silent retreat, he advised me to read the Gospel of John and the woman caught in adultery over and over and over again, to the point where, you know, we’d go back every day and we would talk about it and I would say, “Can I get another text to read here?” 

And, you know, I eventually got out of that tendency to basically see the problems in the structure, see the problems in this person or that person, to blame the system. And I began to see the role that I myself played in that, in the problem. Just in the very complaining that I was doing about it, I was actually making it worse. So all of those mimetic dynamics came back to self-examination. 

And that’s part of what I was trying to do with the book, is to kind of make it an uncomfortable book to read, in that there’s a lot of— a lot of the Girard stuff that I’ve seen out there is just very much at the intellectual level, looking for information outside of ourselves and learning how to examine the world outside of ourselves, but not the world inside of ourselves and the interior dynamics that are going on. That singular retreat changed my life, changed the way that I react to things that are going on that make me uncomfortable. And I think that’s a skill. We have to be trained to change the way that we react to things that we don’t like, or to people that might make us uncomfortable, or to people that we view as rivals in some way. And that’s been a lifelong process for me. But I think that that’s one of the most important things we can do is understand how we react mimetically to the people and the things that we see, that we read about in the news, that come into our lives.

Cherie Harder: Well, there’s so much more I could ask, but I know we’re already at 13 minutes after the hour, and there’s lots of questions that are lined up from our viewers. So we’ll turn to questions from you all watching. And as many of you know, you can not only ask a question, but you can like a question. And that helps give us an idea of what some of the more popular questions are. So our first question comes from Madonna Hamel, who asked, “Can you address the difference between material desire and spiritual yearning and how we can discern between the two?”

Luke Burgis: Mhm. That’s a great question. And I think this goes back to maybe a distinction we need to make about what Gerard meant when he spoke about desire. And we might even need to sort of define the word desire a bit. Thomas Aquinas used the word “appetites.” He never used the word desire. And part of that is just a Latin-to-English translation issue. But he spoke of appetites. There’s various appetites that we have. We have intellectual appetites. We have spiritual appetites. We have effective appetites. We have biological appetites. So Gerard would certainly say that if we are thirsty in the desert or hungry, the kind of desire that would lead us to want to drink a glass of water or to eat something is not a mimetic desire. It’s biological desire. We don’t rely on a model to help show us that. Spiritual desires, they draw on kind of the core of the person and our whole selves and are always leading us towards something that cannot be completely fulfilled in this life. 

And I think examining—going back to part of what we were talking about earlier in the conversation—understanding the transcendent nature of desire and asking us, “is this increasing my faith, hope, and love?” is a core way to discern the nature of that desire. If it’s increasing your faith, your hope, and/or your love, it’s a spiritual desire. It’s what I would call a thick desire. And in the very nature of that desire, as opposed to a thin mimetic desire, is that the more you desire it and the more you commune with it, probably the more that you want, because God is in that. 

Cherie Harder: You know, our next question kind of plays a little bit on the one that just came before. Roger Lang asked, “How does the declaration of Psalm 37:4 ‘Delight yourself in the Lord, and he shall give you the desires of your heart’—or the sense is that this delight is really in the reception of the different set of desires, as opposed to getting what you want—how does that align with or differ from Girard’s concept of mimetic desire?”

Luke Burgis: Yeah, it’s interesting because the first movement there is delighting in the Lord. Right. It’s a movement of just pure delight and then desire as something that we receive rather than as something that we are constructing or pursuing or manipulating ourselves. So there’s just an openness to the will of God there. Right? Wanting what God wants. And that sort of comes from that openness, from that delight, from that gratitude, from the liturgy which shapes our desires. And I think just the very movement of that is very different than, you know, thinking about what it is that I myself want, is just a solipsistic way to think about it. So thinking about our desires detached from prayer, detached from the community of which we are a part, is the opposite of what that Psalm is describing.

I think one of the fundamental tensions that we have in human life is the desire to be who we are, in some sense, the desire to be someone who is called by name and differentiated, simultaneous with the desire to be in communion. And, you know, in the liturgy, standing side by side with other people who desire the same thing, but also bring with them to the liturgy all of their own very specific and perhaps disordered desires. And sitting in that tension there is an important place to be, to wrestle with. I mean, in heaven, we are both ourselves and we’re also in communion with other people. We don’t simply get swallowed up. Right? So sometimes I think that individualism can actually be—or the negative associations with individualism—can be overplayed, but we find our desires in the community, like the church, in the liturgy. But that doesn’t mean that we have to completely give up our sense of self.

Cherie Harder: Even in reading your book, I was struck by how the image of Christians as the body, distinct but united, and all in support of each other, was a beautiful reconciliation of the tension that you described there between wanting to belong and wanting to differentiate. Our next question comes from Henry McHenry, who asked, “Isn’t our strongest desire to be right? And how is that desire to be transcended? What feeds the desperation to be right? And what’s the antidote?”

Luke Burgis: Mhm. You know, I think the desire to be right, we’ve all had that desire. And I’ve had the desire to be right. And it was an empty desire. I mean, what do I gain for that, to be right in something? It’s related to the desire for truth, which I think is the thick desire underneath the desire to be right. The desire to be right is usually framed as being right relative to somebody else being wrong. And that is essentially the mimetic and rivalrous way to think about the pursuit of truth. So the antidote to having to be right, I think, which is related to wanting to be liked— these things are deeply related to us needing our self-worth to come from how we stack up against other people. And I think the desire to be right is almost always framed in some kind of a mimetic way, and that the desire for truth, which can be shared and need not be rivalrous, is the antidote to that. And what’s better than standing shoulder to shoulder, as C.S. Lewis would probably say, with a friend or with your spouse and delighting in the truth together. That feels very different than me needing to be right.

Cherie Harder: Yeah, that’s a great word. So I want to bundle two questions, which I think go together quite well. Lyle Muk asks, “Can you discuss the relationship of mimetic desire and violence?” And somewhat similarly, Jonathan King asked, “Where do you see scapegoating violence sneaking up on us today?”

Luke Burgis: Those questions are complex, and I don’t know if I’ll have time to explain where Girard’s theory leads, but the short answer is Girard believes that mimetic desire is kind of the root of human violence. You look at Cain and Abel, one of the very first stories in Genesis, came to view each other as rivals. First murder. And it’s the lack of an ability to see another as our brother or sister, and they turn into our rivals. Mimetic desire naturally kind of leads to rivalry when it’s not oriented towards something transcendent. So we kind of catch desires from other people. They’re competing with us for the object of that desire. And in a world where goods are scarce—not everything is scarce, virtues are not scarce—but mimetic desire can sort of lead to a scarcity mindset in us and can lead to rivalry and eventually to violence, where we’re constantly trying to displace our own role in creating this kind of mimetic rivalry onto other people and finding scapegoats.

What was the last part of the question? Where do I see this happening?

Cherie Harder: Yeah. Where do you see scapegoating violence sneaking up on us today?

Luke Burgis: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know if it is today any more than it has in human history, but today I think technology is the way that it sneaks up on us. Technology is the one X factor. It’s the thing that’s new. And what it does is it just makes our violence almost shielded from us because it doesn’t seem like the violence that it is. It just seems like a mob on Twitter or online. And in a sense, the violence is diffused across millions or billions of people. So it’s not as if we see a horrific act of physical violence in front of us. Instead, there’s all of these tiny acts of subtle forms of violence and hatred that are happening that we’re almost shielded from seeing through technology. And I think more scapegoats are made every day on social media than were made in the 100 years before the advent of social media. So I think that technology is the way, is the back door, that we are having to deal with the scapegoat mechanism and the shifting of blame. And we have to see that. We have to have eyes to see how that’s happening.

Cherie Harder: Yeah. Your answer anticipates the next question which is from viewer Rosalind Bowman. And Rosalind asks, “In light of mimetic desire, how should Christians relate to technology such as smartphone use? I’ve been influenced by your article about the three-city problem and would love to hear thoughts on how Jerusalem, Athens, and Silicon Valley ought to interact.”

Luke Burgis: So I am very much of the Jonathan Haidt, you know, the phone-based childhood is highly problematic because it’s incredibly difficult for me to not become distracted and to not be pulled in all of these memetic directions through my smartphone. So I can’t imagine— I have an eight-month-old daughter. I can’t imagine somebody whose brain is still forming having to deal with that. The essay that she’s referring to, “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem and Silicon Valley?” is an essay that I wrote to try to explain the fragmentation that I see happening in the world where the world of Jerusalem, representing religious wisdom and the spiritual, the world of Athens, representing pure sort of reason, and then the world of Silicon Valley, which kind of represents utilitarian solutions to things. Right? A famous VC recently said the solution to all of our technology problems is more technology, and I certainly disagree very strongly with that. So I tend to see Athens, the world of reason, and religious wisdom, and Silicon Valley in a mimetic rivalry with each other. And many people have been formed in one of these three what I call cities, metaphorical cities. So it’s very difficult for somebody to bring religious wisdom into some kind of a public policy debate or something like that. It’s just not welcome. Or into a debate about technology.

So all three of these different sort of cities that have different, I would call it, metaphysical assumptions are interacting in some very, very strange ways today. And to have a healthy anthropological foundation for some of the discussions that we’re having, we have to be integrated. Right? We’re all three of those things. We are builders and creators, which Silicon Valley represents very well. We are spiritual creatures represented by Jerusalem, and we’re rational creatures, represented by Athens. And I think a healthy school or community or family recognizes that kind of center of the person, which we need to kind of regain rather than, I think, deciding that human nature was some unknowable X, and we’re just going to, as a society, we’re just going to agree to disagree. No, we actually need to have fundamental metaphysical questions about what it means to be human.

Cherie Harder: Well, Luke, this has been fascinating. I would love to listen to you much longer. And hopefully at some point we can have you back. And in just a moment, I want to give you the last word. But before we do that, a few thoughts just to share with all of you who are watching. First, immediately after we conclude we will be sending around an online feedback form. We would love to have your thoughts. We read all of these. We will get our technology working next time. And as a small incentive for giving us your thoughts, we will give you a code for a free Trinity Forum Reading download of your choice. And there’s actually quite a few Trinity Forum Readings that we would recommend, both in terms of providing interesting models, but also in terms of exploring the themes that we’ve discussed in more depth, including Augustine’s “Confessions” and “City of God,” “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula Le Guin, “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” by Leo Tolstoy, “On Happiness” by Aquinas, and “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley.

In addition, for all of you who registered, we will be sending around an email tomorrow around noon, with a lightly edited version of today’s Online Conversation, as well as a list of further readings and resources in case you want to dive more deeply into the topic, and we encourage you to share this conversation with others. Start a conversation about the ideas that we’ve been talking about today.

In addition, I’d love to invite all of you watching to join the Trinity Forum Society, which is the community of people who help advance Trinity Forum’s mission of cultivating, curating, and disseminating the best of Christian thought for the common good. In addition to being part of the community, there’s a number of benefits to being a Trinity Forum Society member, including a subscription to our quarterly Trinity Forum Readings, a subscription to our daily “What We’re Reading” list of reading recommendations. And as a special incentive to those of you watching, with your gift of $100 or more or your new membership, we will send you a signed copy of Luke’s incredible book, Wanting. So hope that we will be able to welcome you into the Trinity Forum Society soon. And if you’re interested in sponsoring a future Online Conversation, we would love to hear from you. Feel free to indicate that on the feedback form or simply by reaching out to us at mail@TFF.org.

Coming up next week, this time next week, we will be hosting Shirley Mullen around her new book, The Courageous Middle. We’ll be releasing soon our August schedule as well and already have lined up for this fall a number of speakers you’ll want to hear from, including Abram von Engen, Yuval Levin, Francis Collins, and many others. So stay tuned for that.

Finally, as promised, Luke, the last word is yours.

Luke Burgis: Thanks so much, Cherie. Well, I would recommend to anybody on the call that wants to go back to the source and read Girard, especially for Christians I think the most meaningful spiritual book of René Girard’s is a book called I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. So I would highly recommend that book.

But what I want to do as my last word is just read a couple of quotes straight from Girard that I think are incredibly important. Neither one of them is from that book. They’re related quotes, though, one from the beginning of his career and one from the end of his career. And the first one is from his book called Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. And he says this—I’m going to read it because I don’t have these committed to memory—he says, “Books themselves will have no more than minor importance. The events within which such books emerge will be infinitely more eloquent than whatever we write, and will establish truths we have difficulty describing.” That’s a difficult thing to read as one who is in the process of writing a book right now. “Books themselves will have no more than minor importance.” But Gerard is talking about the events, right? And Christianity is really about an event. And the awareness of that event in history ebbs and wanes and grows as we move on. But I think Gerard always was talking about this juxtaposition between events and action and our awareness of it. So I think this is a fundamental part of Gerard.

And the last quote that I want to read, which is related to the first, is from his very last book, published in 2009, at least in English, and he’s commenting on September 11th. And this goes back to one of the questions about violence. I was right next to the towers because I was a student, an undergrad student, in New York City on 9/11. So this really hits home for me, and this was my experience of it. Gerard wrote, “On September 11th, people were shaken, but they quickly calmed down. There was a flash of awareness which lasted a few fractions of a second. People could feel that something was happening, and then a blanket of silence covered up the crack in our certainty of safety. Western rationalism operates like a myth. We always work harder to avoid seeing the catastrophe. We neither can nor want to see violence as it is.” 

And I close with those quotes because I think that understanding Girard, not at an intellectual level, but at a deeply existential level, means cultivating a sense of awareness about what’s going on inside of us when things happen in the world, when things happen to us, and understanding the way that we react to those things, and understanding the meaning that those events have in our lives and in history. The alternative is a mimetic reaction. But I think Gerard here is proposing to us to seek deeper, to examine our desires, and to become aware of how the people and events in our lives are affecting our desires, and whether they’re leading us closer to or further away from God.

Cherie Harder: Luke, thanks so much. This has been really fascinating and quite valuable.

Luke Burgis: Thanks so much. 

Cherie Harder: Thank you to all of you for joining us. Have a great weekend.