We need good models; not the hot, sexy kind, although I can appreciate the beauty of the human form, but models to imitate in good character and essence. Without good models, we don't stop modelling. We are always modelling something to be desired.
I recently read Luke Burgis' book Wanting, where he gets into Rene Girard's mimetic theory:
Girard believed that all true desire—the post-instinctual kind—is metaphysical. People are always in search of something that goes beyond the material world. If someone falls under the influence of a model who mediates the desire for a handbag, it’s not the handbag they are after. It’s the imagined newness of being they think it will bring. “Desire is not of this world,” Girard has said, “… it is in order to penetrate into another world that one desires, it is in order to be initiated into a radically foreign existence.”
So once again we are condemned to be religious. We are always groping for something to compensate for the unsatisfactoriness of life. But how do we do that in a culture that makes man the standard of himself? We see the results thus far. In the age of the internet, authority is everywhere—which means its nowhere! With all the fragmentation and atomization, we lack a center to rely on and are therefore compelled to outsource our humanity to the influencers and “experts”; to various shifting authority figures; to mimetic models that come and go and have little grounding in reality.
Burgis states, “it seems that the primary and underexplored reason for our stagnation and decadence is mimesis. We lack a transcendent reference point outside the system. Meanwhile, everyone is more or less imitating everyone else. Our culture is stuck because we’re fighting over space in a pool, next to the ocean. Yet nobody dares to talk openly about it, this mimesis. It’s the hidden force driving our cultural development, and yet it’s taboo to speak about, like envy.”
Mimesis requires a light lift, and therefore it's easily exported from person to person. It's stripped of complexity, richness, and depth; providing a safe haven of conformity without the risk of social alienation from one's tribe or any intellectual challenge that would make one uncomfortable or humble.
What is more fascinating (and often tragic) is that our choices in life are always prioritized for us by the object sought than the inclination in our soul. In D.C. Schindler's The Politics of the Real, he makes this astute point:
The motion of desire does not begin in the soul, but instead begins in the object sought, which, as Aristotle has said, stands to the soul as an unmoved mover. Properly understood, this means that the good that I pursue makes a claim on me before I make a claim on it in my choice. In other words, in pursuing a good, the compelling power of which I recognize rather than arbitrarily posit, I am implicitly and analogously representing its authority, as we will elaborate below. My choice is always and inevitably responsive and thus “obedient” at its base; whenever choice occurs, it occurs as a consent to a claim on my appetite that precedes its own deliberate act.
This makes a good case that our models are more important than whatever agency we assume we inhabit. Or in other words, free will is never in a vacuum. This also makes the case for how liberalism without a transcendent model can eat itself alive—which we can easily affirm when we look around.
Even having a transcendent model can be corrupted, if not Revealed as Truth and grounded in Beauty and Goodness. In other words, we make God a silent partner who makes no demands on us.
What happens, then, when the highest principle of all gets reinterpreted, no longer as pure act, but now more basically as potency—first as potentia absoluta , then as a generic truth expressed incompletely in a variety of traditions, and finally as an “option,” the possible object of “religious preference”? The absolute no longer functions as the ultimate reference point that makes sense of everything else, or rather, because God remains in some sense highest, this revolution in the meaning of God introduces into the cosmic order a fundamental contradiction, which generates an endless, and constantly self-sustaining and indeed self-reinventing, series of dialectics, divisions, and dissemblings (Schindler).
Is there any hope from all this foolishness? Schindler says, “as Plato argued relentlessly in his dialogues, the pursuit of one’s own good is inescapably a pursuit of one’s own good.” To escape our mimetic traps, we need to become good models and have good models. The Saints have always held this role in the Church, and in turn they imitated Christ. Recall Saint Augustine's plea: “Why art thou proud, O man? God for thee became low. Thou wouldst perhaps be ashamed to imitate a lowly man; then at least imitate the lowly God.” There was a reason God became man, so that we can become more than merely man trapped in a fruitless search of empty desires. He imitated us, so we could model Him.