The Want of Others
In a previous post, I mentioned one of my guilty pleasures being podcast listening. Over a recent long weekend, I found that I had another, being watching North Americans explore Australian things. Having lived in America for a spell, I did get a kick out of introducing my American friends to the things Asian and Australian. Little did I realise that this was something that I still enjoy a decade on.
This secret love I found out when I stumbled across the food blogger Mark Wiens’ Youtube channel, which featured a line of videos dedicated to the food in Australia. Unlike other food vloggers that I have watched, Wiens stands out as someone who does a lot of research into the dish or the purveyor of that dish.
One particular video focused on the food in my old stomping ground of Sydney, and Wiens then went on to some of my old food haunts, laced banh mi, hand pulled noodles and Lebanese chicken.
Needless to say, the videos featured Wiens tucking into the dishes in question and focusing on the look of enjoyment on his face. This was unsurprising and typical of most food vlogs.
What was surprising, however, was that my watching this particular American’s watching of Australian fare advancing into his maw, made me desire those very dishes. More specifically, I was surprised to find myself wanting to experience those dishes again in their native habitat of Sydney.
At one level, you could say that watching these videos hit me with the nostalgia bug. The trouble is that I have in the last year and a bit been blissfully ensconced in my little corner of country Australia, not having any urge to walk down memory lane (both figuratively and literally). Watching Wiens, however, became an engine that reawakened that desire for specifically Sydney food, which has lasted till now.
I bring this episode up because it was a microcosm of how we desire. Often, we imagine desire to be something that is inherent within us, that is either brought out spontaneously by ourselves or by some reminder from the outside. Either way, we think of desires as a preset category residing within us. By this logic, I have always had this desire for Sydney food which, in my years of living in Wagga, I had managed to bury.
The contrast to this type of desire is the type articulated by Rene Girard, which goes by the shorthand of “mimetic desire”. In Girard, desire is less inherent and spontaneous as it is learnt and mediated. Put another way, we desire things because we learn to desire it by watching - and later mimicking - that desire playing out in others. The other person then becomes what Girard calls a “model” for our desire. By this reckoning, it is not that I have suppressed by inherent desire for Sydney food; rather, Wiens had become the model of my desire for pork rolls, chicken and noodles in hole-in-the-wall shops in Marrickville, Granville and Chinatown.
This little lesson in mimetic desire is interesting, but you would be forgiven for asking why a Christian might care about this little anthropological nugget. Uncannily, this little episode coincided with my weekend listening to Clerically Speaking, which recently returned after a brief hiatus. One of those episodes was a special interview with Luke Burgis, who recently wrote a popular account of Girard’s mimetic theory entitled Wanting.
In one fascinating segment of the episode, Burgis candidly shared about the process of his discernment, first into the seminary and later out of it. What was striking was the way in which mimetic desire featured in his discernment process where discernment, if I heard him correctly, was less a matter of what he desired within himself than a process of learning the desires (rightly or wrongly) of others. More importantly, one subtle thread I noticed running through the interview was how crucial Christian discernment revolves around desiring after the desire of God.
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