Desire and Mimesis

How we're imitators at heart

(This post was written last week, but in the flurry of travel and all things WEDDING, I never managed to get it scheduled! Thanks for your patience!)

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As I write, I’m in the front seat of the car, driving to our oldest daughter’s wedding in Montreal. Unusually, we’ve left in the early afternoon rather than first thing in the morning (because SO MANY THINGS TO PACK), and we’re hoping to make it to Rochester several hours after dinner. We’ll get up early tomorrow morning, stop at Wegmans for food to pack for lunch (yes, my first time at Wegmans!!!), then arrive in Montreal early enough to jump into wedding mode and help with what’s needed. As I want to be fully present to the joy that’s ahead of our family this week, I’m writing and scheduling this letter a week in advance.

Whenever I leave Cincinnati and return to Canada, I’m reminded of the reality of mimetic systems, a concept I was introduced to by Luke Burgis, author of Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. (As I reminder, I have a scheduled call with Luke Burgis and A.J. Swoboda on July 1 at 3 pm EST/12 pm PST, and you’re invited! Zoom info will follow closer to the date, if you want to join live, but I will also provide access to the recording for those who can’t.)

I know mimesis isn’t your everyday word. In reality, it’s just a fancy word that means imitation. A mimetic system, then, is a way to speak to the conditioning of our environments. We are shaped and changed by them, even conformed to them.

Let me unpack this a bit, and I promise it will get less confusing.

For starters, let’s consider that to live in Cincinnati (and the US) is to be formed into some recognizable Cincinnati (and American) desires. To live in Canada is to be formed into different desires. It's to say that desire isn’t just something welling up from within but rather something being shaped from without.

If I live in Cincinnati, I am conditioned, as one example, to want geographical stability. It’s likely I’ve been raised here and will want to raise my kids here. In Cincinnati, when people ask you, “Where did you go to school?” they don’t mean college but high school. By contrast, if I live in Toronto, I’m much more likely to value professional ambition and the mobility that such ambition might require. Toronto attracts people who are pursuing graduate degrees and fellowships and global work experience. It is an expensive city to live in, making it less affordable for families to raise their children there.

To live in Cincinnati is to learn to want as a Cincinnatian. To live in Toronto is to learn to want as a Torontonian.

Luke Burgis was an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who discovered the work of French academic René Girard on the advice of a mentor. In 2008, Burgis thought he was soon selling his e-commerce company for wellness products, FitFuel.com, to Zappos. It was a time when he was admittedly contradicted in many of his desires. He had built a company he no longer wanted to lead and was eager to sell. But he could also see that “what I wanted seemed to change daily: more respect and status, less responsibility; more capital, fewer investors; more public speaking, more privacy; an intense lust for money followed by extreme bouts of virtue signaling involving the world social" (xxiii). Burgis could see that his desires were impacted by external forces, that he was far more suggestible than he might previously have thought. We are all part of an "ecology of desire," Burgis writes (3). It’s to say that certain values get promoted—and others demoted, depending on where you’re standing in the world. In fact, it’s why so much sorting happens geographically. We learn to want as our neighbors want. (There are so many obvious political implications here.)

As Burgis explains, Girard's main insight was this, that desire is not intrinsic but mimetic, or imitative. We don’t want what we want, in other words; we want what has been deemed valuable by others. Of course, we prefer to think that our desires are authentic, stamped with the uniqueness of our very selves, but Burgis spends the book exploring ways in which we’re shaped by the desires of others. In a note to readers in the front matter of the book, Burgis says that he is not trying to argue that we can overcome mimetic desire, only become more aware of it. That sounds soberly realistic to me—and crucially important for Christians, who want to want as God wants. They can’t imagine that private spiritual practices will do all the necessary transformative work. No, deliberate communal participation will be required.

As I’ve been reflecting this month on Teach Us To Want, Burgis’s book has provided some helpful language I didn’t have at the time of writing my first book ten years ago. I didn’t have fancy words like “mimetic,” and I certainly had no familiarity with the work of René Girard. I might wish now that I could have explored more in depth how mimetic systems had shaped my own story: that as a student at Wheaton College in the 1990s, I was influenced to value intellectual formation (and early marriage); that a new mother, surrounded by conservative Christians, I was influenced to choose homeschooling for our children (if only for a short season); that when I moved to Toronto and attended a church full of ambitious and artistic people, I was influenced to write; that when I returned to the polarized landscape of the United States in 2022, I have been influenced toward the necessity of partisan identification (though I still reject it).

Everywhere I’ve lived, I’ve been taught to want.

We think of desire as free and voluntary, but we aren’t as independent and non-conformist as we think. So, what would I add to Teach Us to Want today? I’d ask readers to inventory the values and priorities of their communities. I’d ask them to choose belonging in places that form them in the way of Jesus. I’d ask them to consider how their own family environments might become deliberate mimetic systems, where holy desire is “caught” as much as taught.

We don't sustain or sort our desires easily. What we want today will not always be what we want tomorrow (especially if we change communities). Even today's desires war with one another for primacy. We want close relationships—and we want fewer interruptions. We want to lose weight—and we want another cookie. We want good for the failing public school at the end of our block—and we want safety and opportunity for our own children. We want intellectual growth—and we want to be less mentally taxed.

As I wrote in Teach Us to Want, we must be apprenticed into a life of coherent, committed holy desire. And as I would add more forcefully today, for this we will need our neighbor’s help.