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tealinSo we've had our mimetic crisis, as the war of each-against-each hots up and violence rises. Our animosities have aligned and then, like a magnet to iron filings, the scapegoat attracts all the community's violence and unifies us in collective hatred of them. We rise up, unite our energies for the very necessary and urgent expulsion of this common enemy, and when at last the battle is won, peace reigns in the land.
As Girard puts it:
If the scapegoat was responsible for all the bad feelings – as they most certainly were, or we would not have violently expelled them; we are reasonable creatures – then they must also be responsible for this sudden inexplicable peace which has come upon us, because it was their expulsion/death that it brought it about. They must be something other than human, to have this powerful effect on all of us. Perhaps they are something divine. Perhaps they didn't really die, or were transformed, or did die in some mortal sense but are granting us their blessings from beyond the veil.
This all sounds like I'm assuming people are credulous idiots, but remember that this is unconscious, and the effect can be subtle. There are enough historical examples to show how this seed could be planted, which grows as the collective violence recedes in the cultural memory. It doesn't have to be a literal divinization (though it sometimes is: think of Julius Caesar) – often the scapegoat is just put on a pedestal, or gilded in an attempt to make a collective apology for the collective violence. Over time, as history turns into legend, these can become divinizations, and even within living memory the effect can be almost the same.
My favourite example of this is the Romanov family. At the time of the Russian Revolution, Nicholas II was on the throne; as the top representative of the feudal system, the people's rage focused on him and his family. They were quickly apprehended and sent off into exile, where, eventually, they were executed. In 1981 they were canonised as saints by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, and adopted by the church at home after Communism fell. You don't get more divinized than that these days.
There are echoes, also, in how John F. Kennedy is remembered in the US. He was not a victim of collective violence, but was a victim whose death united a deeply divided country in mourning – a scapegoat after the fact, in a way. He is now held up as an ideal of an American president, his administration mythologised as 'Camelot,' his persona unimpeachable compared to his peers.
The tendency to divinize scapegoats may not be consciously known, but is unconsciously acknowledged by anyone who advises not to kill a prominent figure 'lest they become a martyr.' A martyr may not be a god, but they continue to have power over their followers after death – perhaps even more than in life – which is close enough for government work, as they say.
*This is the Greek notion of catharsis, which I will definitely be getting into later [points at icon], but there's a lot of dinner to get through before dessert.
Chapter 19: Which Goat to Scape?
As Girard puts it:
No one in the community has an enemy other than the victim, so once this person is hunted, expelled, and destroyed, the crowd finds itself emptied of hostility and without an enemy. Only one enemy was left, one who has been eliminated. Provisionally, at least, this community no longer experiences either hatred or resentment toward anyone or anything; it feels purified* of all its tensions, of all its divisions, of everything fragmenting it.
The persecutors don't know that their sudden harmony, like their previous discord, is the work of contagious imitation. They believe they have on their hands a dangerous person, someone evil, of whom they must rid the community. What could be more sincere than their hatred? Thus the mimetic ganging up of all against one, or the single victim mechanism, has the amazing but logically explicable property of restoring calm to a community so disturbed an instant earlier that nothing appeared capable of calming it down. [I See Satan Fall Like Ligntning, Chapter 3]
If the scapegoat was responsible for all the bad feelings – as they most certainly were, or we would not have violently expelled them; we are reasonable creatures – then they must also be responsible for this sudden inexplicable peace which has come upon us, because it was their expulsion/death that it brought it about. They must be something other than human, to have this powerful effect on all of us. Perhaps they are something divine. Perhaps they didn't really die, or were transformed, or did die in some mortal sense but are granting us their blessings from beyond the veil.
This all sounds like I'm assuming people are credulous idiots, but remember that this is unconscious, and the effect can be subtle. There are enough historical examples to show how this seed could be planted, which grows as the collective violence recedes in the cultural memory. It doesn't have to be a literal divinization (though it sometimes is: think of Julius Caesar) – often the scapegoat is just put on a pedestal, or gilded in an attempt to make a collective apology for the collective violence. Over time, as history turns into legend, these can become divinizations, and even within living memory the effect can be almost the same.
My favourite example of this is the Romanov family. At the time of the Russian Revolution, Nicholas II was on the throne; as the top representative of the feudal system, the people's rage focused on him and his family. They were quickly apprehended and sent off into exile, where, eventually, they were executed. In 1981 they were canonised as saints by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, and adopted by the church at home after Communism fell. You don't get more divinized than that these days.
There are echoes, also, in how John F. Kennedy is remembered in the US. He was not a victim of collective violence, but was a victim whose death united a deeply divided country in mourning – a scapegoat after the fact, in a way. He is now held up as an ideal of an American president, his administration mythologised as 'Camelot,' his persona unimpeachable compared to his peers.
The tendency to divinize scapegoats may not be consciously known, but is unconsciously acknowledged by anyone who advises not to kill a prominent figure 'lest they become a martyr.' A martyr may not be a god, but they continue to have power over their followers after death – perhaps even more than in life – which is close enough for government work, as they say.
*This is the Greek notion of catharsis, which I will definitely be getting into later [points at icon], but there's a lot of dinner to get through before dessert.
Chapter 19: Which Goat to Scape?
