In the seaside town where my parents had a weekend place, having a shiny car was risky. Wild turkeys lived in the marsh. If they wandered into your driveway, one might see its own image in your door panel and pick a fight with it. This left your car with beak marks and could wound the turkey too.
René Girard might have found metaphorical use for this. The French theorist’s great idea was that religion and culture grow out of what he called mimetic rivalry. Human beings, uniquely, choose the objects of their desire largely on the basis of what other people desire. “There is nothing, or next to nothing, in human behaviour that is not learned, and all learning is based on imitation,” he writes. But while mimesis helps us learn, it also leads to escalating competition, and ultimately violence. Religion evolved as a means for containing rivalry by projecting communal violence on to an arbitrarily chosen sacrificial victim, the scapegoat.
I like Girard’s theory because I tried and failed to come up with it myself. Some decades ago, I wrote a notably bad PhD dissertation arguing that the English-speaking enlightenment philosophers were mistaken in thinking that rational action starts with pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. That’s too individualistic; we learn what to want by watching others. I was a proto-Girardian without having heard of him (Anglo-American philosophy departments discourage the reading of French social scientists). I got my degree, but I was no philosopher and switched to finance.