Why David Brooks Needs Mimetic Theory – and So Do You

Anyone honestly interested in a solution to the emergence of ISIL in Iraq needs to learn the basics of mimetic theory. Without mimetic theory, we fall victim to catastrophic failures of logic, which lead to equally catastrophic decisions made in ignorance of our own foolishness. New York Times columnist David Brooks provides an excellent case study for my claim with his article “The Good Order”.

His flawed analysis nearly broke my heart because I admire Brooks so much. He is a conservative without being rigid, a Republican without being ideological and an avid student of the human mind and the social sciences. His blunder is directly related to his ignorance of mimetic theory and therefore his reliance on the failed perspective of rationalist thinking, a perspective he would no doubt claim to have abandoned long ago. But he remains captive to its misguided worldview because he has not found mimetic theory and its radical rethinking about what makes us human and what makes human beings good and/ or evil.

In his column, Brooks justifies President Obama’s strategy in Iraq and Syria as the unique responsibility of the world’s last remaining super power to maintain global order.

You can’t have freedom, trust, democracy and self-determination when thugs like Vladimir Putin of Russia are rampaging across borders and monsters like the Islamic State are killing innocents.

The world’s superpower has a hard and unpleasant duty. The United States is obligated to organize coalitions to impose rule of law — to beat back the wolves and maintain that order.

As the most powerful good guy, Brooks appears to be saying, the U.S. must take the lead in disciplining the world’s bad guys to preserve order and maintain peace. Brooks begins his global argument in an unexpected way, by demonstrating the importance of order for individual creativity. He uses as his examples the work habits of three great writers: Maya Angelou, John Cheever and Anthony Trollope. Each had a unique routine that they adhered to relentlessly. Here’s what he tells us about John Cheever:

John Cheever would get up, put on his only suit, ride the elevator in his apartment building down to a storage room in the basement. Then he’d take off his suit and sit in his boxers and write until noon. Then he’d put the suit back on and ride upstairs to lunch.

Brooks accurately makes the connection between this intensive self-discipline with extraordinary creative output. A favorite saying among writers is that the difference between writers and the rest of us is that “Writers write”. It seems like an absurd oversimplification, but it is closer to the truth than we may want to admit. Many of us dream of writing the great American novel (well, I did, anyway) but few of us want it badly enough to subject ourselves to such rigid daily regimens.

What writers know is that they may have talent inside them, but to get it out they don’t need to look inside. They need to work on externals with the dedication of someone with OCD. Brooks explained that Maya Angelou always kept a deck of cards and a bottle of sherry nearby when she was working. Anthony Trollope timed his output so that he wrote 250 words every 15 minutes for two and a half hours every day. What Brooks missed in his own examples is that creative output depends less on talent and more on the environment. Talented writers know how to create environments in which they can control for distractions and optimize conditions for focus and concentration. Without a proper environment, talent is a wasted possession.

Equating the relationship of writers to their environment to a good guy/ bad guy battle fails to adequately describe the dynamic at play. Disciplined writers do not defeat their environment or even some unruly part of themselves. It’s not a battle at all but much more like a meeting of the minds or a good partnership. Rather than do battle with their own susceptibility to outside influences, successful writers use it to their advantage to create the ordered environment they know will produces the results they desire. Good parenting creates order, too, Brooks explained, without picking up that again we are not talking about doing battle but rather making peace with our susceptibility to changes in the environment. Brooks says it quite plainly while missing his own point: a parent’s “main job is to provide daily predictability and emotional security” – in other words, to create an ordered environment so that children can feel free to explore and take risks in order to thrive.

Mimetic theory explains why this type of ordered environment has such beneficial effects. “Mimetic” is the Greek word for imitation and according to mimetic theory, human beings have this extraordinary ability to absorb from or imitate what we find in our environment, whether what we find are other people or natural environments or environments that we make for ourselves. Human beings, it turns out, are not discrete individual actors who are independent of outside influences. We are not divided up into good guys and bad guys who are qualitatively different from one another. On the contrary, all human beings are “mimetic”, that is, what makes us human is our incredible openness to the influence of others and our environments.

We have our own wills and freedom to choose, but we cannot choose to NOT be influenced by others. Our choice consists of who and what we will be in relationship with. If David Brooks and President Obama were aware of the basic fact of mimetic theory they would be coming to very different conclusions about how to combat violent extremism. They would see that by responding violently to ISIL or Putin or whatever violent actor is capturing our attention at the moment, we are responding mimetically. Rather than acting independently or with originality, we are reactive and imitative, returning violence for violence, as ridiculous as if we were engaged in a Three Stooges routine. They would also see that ISIS, or Putin for that matter, did not arise in a vacuum, but are themselves responding mimetically to environmental influences, many of which we have been party to creating. (Read this and this to see how we create our own problems.)

Two things, and two things only, will generate an effective response to ISIS: self-reflection and self-restraint. Rather than seeing the U.S. as some heroic actor defeating global evil, we need to examine our complicity in the situation that currently threatens innocent people in the conflict zones. Out of that reflection, we must begin to act with originality in violent situations, finding the creative discipline of a great writer in order to create the environments for peace rather than environments of perpetual warfare. For the U.S. to lead rather than imitate the violence of those we claim to oppose would require the quiet heroism of self-discipline and the courage to resist the pressure for war. Are we capable of such leadership? Perhaps only the likes of Angelou, Cheever and Trollope have the disciplined creative power to imagine it could be so.