CATEGORY: CULTURE (31 min)

From victim to victor

When someone tragically dies, it’s a natural human response to express support and love for the individual. But when one tragedy becomes a global movement that leads to moralizing power grabs and a culture of intolerance, it’s just making the situation worse.

In Compact, Geoff Shullenberger details the life of a man who predicted exactly how powerful victims could become. René Girard, a French Renaissance man who taught at Duke, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and many other universities, wrote about countless topics in history, philosophy, and religion.

One of those topics was “victimism,” which Girard characterized as using “the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power.” Shullenberger writes that Girard had a deep concern about this “victimism.” It causes deep divides across the globe, destroys faith in long-standing institutions, and leads to the death of ordered life.

This is not an unexpected development, according to Girard; it’s the natural progression of a world marked by endless conflict. The only thing that can break this mimetic cycle, he says, is an innocent victim who saves the world.

Read more in Shullenberger’s in-depth piece right here.

CATEGORY: PHILOSOPHY (13 min)

The man, the myth, the Marx

When Karl Marx wrote his now infamous works in the 19^th century, it’s hard to imagine he could have foreseen what dangerous fruit his theories would bear. Every facet of modern American life has seen at least one member of the academia develop a Marxist take.

James Lindsay, writing for New Discourses, overviews a number of offshoots of the Marxist tree, pointing out how each pseudo-theory is connected to the original philosophy. Lindsay analyzes Critical Race Theory, disability studies, gender theories, and more, revealing how they hearken back to Marx’s proposition.

It all starts with the Marxist assumption that there is a special kind of property that some people get to have. Those people use their exclusive rights to that property to dominate society in some way. And Marx argues that the public must fight back against that oppression.

See how this concept permeates modern progressive thought in Lindsay’s review here.

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CATEGORY: POLITICS (24 min)

Re-fusing our thought

Girard’s writings affected Western thought in dozens of different spheres, including the continued development of conservatism. And amidst heated debates about the future of the conservative movement, one writer argues that the Frenchman’s views are needed to help sharpen our thinking.

For our Intercollegiate Review archive, Donald J. Devine applies Girard’s work to one particular branch of conservatism: fusionism. The unique combination of free-market uncoercive means with strongly virtuous ends, fusionism dominated conservative thinking for much of the mid-to-late 20^th century. Today, it has come under fire from some conservatives who believe it doesn’t go far enough.

Devine pushes back against that tendency, arguing that fusionism is still a robust theory despite its recent political stumbles. He instead looks to Girard to find a way to modify the theory and refocus it on more eternal things.

“A serious fusionism today must face the fact that its ideal of freedom has not only relied on coercion to control coercion but also on religion or myth,” Devine writes.

Without a recognition of its religious and traditional roots, Devine believes, fusionism will slip farther and farther towards untethered science.

Discover Devine’s full thoughts here.

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