Girard Digest 19: Which Goat to Scape?
Mar. 31st, 2019 06:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinWe've seen humanity's tendency to take out their collective violence on a scapegoat, and the purgative effect that release of violence has. But who, in this boiling chaos of the mimetic crisis, will draw the short stick of the scapegoat?
The Single Victim Mechanism pops up again and again in all cultures around the world, so it appears that it's something fundamental to how we are socially wired as humans. Different cultures have different ways of dealing with it, preventing it, and defusing it, which I will get to a few entries from now, but for now I want to make a little diversion to explore how scapegoats get chosen.
Scapegoats tend to be obviously 'different' somehow. As Girard puts it in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 'All peoples have a tendency to reject, under some pretext or another, the individuals who don't fit their conception of what is normal and acceptable.' In examining historical and apocryphal scapegoats, Girard says that they tend to be identifiably 'other' to begin with. It could be something physical like a scar, or a limp; they are foreign, or set apart by religion, habit, or ethnicity; they have been socially elevated or have elevated themselves, like a politician or a celebrity; they have transgressed some societal code or broken a taboo. Essentially, they are someone who already has less social currency than the majority, and as the crisis snowballs there is less and less consequence for turning against them. It's OK to take it out on the scapegoat because everyone agrees it's OK: you're not going to lose your own social currency for scapegoating them.
When our village is plunged into crisis – say there is a disease wiping out livestock – the stress and fear exacerbate existing animosities and create new ones; the violence which is the byproduct of the initial crisis threatens to be as dangerous as the crisis itself, and seeks to be channelled away. There might be all kinds of finger pointing and deflection, but the deaf old woman who lives in a hovel at the edge of the forest is an easy one to single out: she never says hello, she has a funny smell, she probably hates us otherwise why would she keep to herself so much? She probably brought down this curse on our cattle out of spite. And her cat looks like it knows things.
Once we start looking, there are all sorts of reasons to confirm she's a wrong 'un, and her behaviour when apprehended doesn't help. Surely it's in everyone's best interests that we give this antagonist her comeuppance, and rid our community of her corrupting presence. Tadaa, single victim mechanism.
This same conjunction of otherness and powerlessness is why Jews keep being scapegoated, everywhere the diaspora took them. They live among us (whoever 'us' is) but are not us – they write funny, dress funny, talk funny; they keep to themselves, have different habits at home, and do who-knows-what in their places of worship; there are too many of them coming here and they're outbreeding us. It is interesting to note that a lot of the complaints about Jews at the turn of the 19th century are exactly the same as the ones made about Muslims now. One might almost be tempted to think there was a repeating pattern that had nothing to do with the objections themselves . . .
I, personally, find it interesting that being somehow 'other' is also a common feature for many stories' protagonists. As it was explained in my screenwriting class, only an outsider can see what is wrong with a paradigm and have the incentive and power to change it. This is why orphans are disproportionately represented in fiction: they have the fresh, objective perspective of a child, can see things which those more securely embedded in social structures cannot, and have agency that the others don't have. Orphans also fall victim to a lot of transferred violence – who is going to stand up for them? – so the wrongs of a society are brought unambiguously home to them.
Chapter 20: The Single Victim Mechanism: a Case Study
The Single Victim Mechanism pops up again and again in all cultures around the world, so it appears that it's something fundamental to how we are socially wired as humans. Different cultures have different ways of dealing with it, preventing it, and defusing it, which I will get to a few entries from now, but for now I want to make a little diversion to explore how scapegoats get chosen.
Scapegoats tend to be obviously 'different' somehow. As Girard puts it in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 'All peoples have a tendency to reject, under some pretext or another, the individuals who don't fit their conception of what is normal and acceptable.' In examining historical and apocryphal scapegoats, Girard says that they tend to be identifiably 'other' to begin with. It could be something physical like a scar, or a limp; they are foreign, or set apart by religion, habit, or ethnicity; they have been socially elevated or have elevated themselves, like a politician or a celebrity; they have transgressed some societal code or broken a taboo. Essentially, they are someone who already has less social currency than the majority, and as the crisis snowballs there is less and less consequence for turning against them. It's OK to take it out on the scapegoat because everyone agrees it's OK: you're not going to lose your own social currency for scapegoating them.
When our village is plunged into crisis – say there is a disease wiping out livestock – the stress and fear exacerbate existing animosities and create new ones; the violence which is the byproduct of the initial crisis threatens to be as dangerous as the crisis itself, and seeks to be channelled away. There might be all kinds of finger pointing and deflection, but the deaf old woman who lives in a hovel at the edge of the forest is an easy one to single out: she never says hello, she has a funny smell, she probably hates us otherwise why would she keep to herself so much? She probably brought down this curse on our cattle out of spite. And her cat looks like it knows things.
Once we start looking, there are all sorts of reasons to confirm she's a wrong 'un, and her behaviour when apprehended doesn't help. Surely it's in everyone's best interests that we give this antagonist her comeuppance, and rid our community of her corrupting presence. Tadaa, single victim mechanism.
This same conjunction of otherness and powerlessness is why Jews keep being scapegoated, everywhere the diaspora took them. They live among us (whoever 'us' is) but are not us – they write funny, dress funny, talk funny; they keep to themselves, have different habits at home, and do who-knows-what in their places of worship; there are too many of them coming here and they're outbreeding us. It is interesting to note that a lot of the complaints about Jews at the turn of the 19th century are exactly the same as the ones made about Muslims now. One might almost be tempted to think there was a repeating pattern that had nothing to do with the objections themselves . . .
I, personally, find it interesting that being somehow 'other' is also a common feature for many stories' protagonists. As it was explained in my screenwriting class, only an outsider can see what is wrong with a paradigm and have the incentive and power to change it. This is why orphans are disproportionately represented in fiction: they have the fresh, objective perspective of a child, can see things which those more securely embedded in social structures cannot, and have agency that the others don't have. Orphans also fall victim to a lot of transferred violence – who is going to stand up for them? – so the wrongs of a society are brought unambiguously home to them.
Chapter 20: The Single Victim Mechanism: a Case Study
