In Search of a Scapegoat

Commentary

Admittedly, I had not been following the Lindsay Clancy case closely. As a father with small children, the sheer horror of it all was too much to bear. 

When I heard there was a single holdout juror who would likely cause the proceedings to end in a mistrial, I naively assumed this person was someone who wanted to find the defendant not criminally responsible for the killing of her children, a lone wolf reflecting the views of a fringe minority in the wider culture, however vocal.

Our holdout juror—a black man and devout Catholic, it turns out—is now, together with his family, on the receiving end of mob wrath, reportedly being stalked and harassed to the point where a state governor has felt compelled to offer him asylum. God bless Ron DeSantis, I say.

Once I finally got up to speed, I was made aware of a darker truth about human nature into which our modern culture now so readily lapses. This is the same truth that was hammered into me at various points during COVID-19, including that moment when our leaders began to impose vaccine mandates and started calling the spread of the virus “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

Then, as now, it became obvious to me we were entering into very dark territory, indeed. But far from uncharted.

Man’s search for a scapegoat is a tale as old as time.

When things are not going according to plan—when there is a virus spreading, a bad harvest, or some terrible act of injustice done that has gone unpunished—every culture we know begins to countenance violence.

According to the French anthropologist René Girard, all of Western culture’s great myths conceal a dark truth about our implicitly violent nature. Girard contends that we are creatures fated to work up an appetite for violence, an appetite that we sate through what he calls the scapegoat mechanism. 

Our religious rituals that reach back into prehistory are predicated on an inextricable and metaphysical link between violence and the sacred. At root, our religious nature is sacrificial.

We give vent to this inexorable drive towards violence by selecting a victim who can concentrate and then release the energy of the mob, Girard tells us, offering some respite from our tendency towards violent escalation.

But rituals must be repeated to be effective. Our search for scapegoats is, therefore, perennial, if the picture Girard draws for us is true.

What’s worse, you might think that any old victim will do: a criminal perhaps, or at least a person outside the tribe, someone who wishes us ill and deserves punishment. But you would be wrong. Just think about it for a moment. Why would the wrath of an angry deity be appeased by anything less than the best of what it is in our power to offer—less than the very best of us?

And who is the best of us, you ask? Why, the innocent, of course. Nothing less than his purity will do.

Gods do not accept an offering that is impure, something or someone we ourselves want rid of. No, God wants Issac, not Cain; Christ, not Barabbas.

It is not only Jews and Christians who have understood this. The Greeks did, too. The winds will not blow the army to Troy until the innocent daughter of the commander of the Greek army is slain for his crimes—for Greek ambition. Like Iphigenia, Cassandra, too, must pay for the sins of others, her only crime to warn the house of Priam and Agamemnon against the imminent danger hanging over them.

In our enlightened age that no longer believes in gods or the stories once told about them, we ourselves have become that angry deity. It is not the mother who has murdered her children that excites our anger, but the dutiful juror who stands alone for the innocent dead. It is not the mendacious and hypocritical politician that draws our ire, but the unvaccinated refusenik.

No one is more naturally innocent than a defenseless child; no one more honorable than he would defend him; none more wicked than any who would rob that child of his life.

Child sacrifice in the pre-Christian world was not uncommon. All of the pagan cultures that endorsed child sacrifice have vanished from the world. There are no ancient Greeks, Trojans, Romans, or Aztecs running around anymore.

The Christian religion that built the very culture that is now giving up on it understood that those civilizations which offer children as a sacrifice spell their own doom.

Girard thought the genius of the Christian religion lay in how it upended the logic of the scapegoat mechanism by self-consciously placing a wholly innocent and good man at the heart of their rites, a man who they also claimed was God himself.

Perhaps it is better, then, to say the Christian religion completed the logic of the scapegoat: the only sacrifice that can appease God Himself is His own Son.

If ever we can begin to recall what the Christian religion once took for granted, whatever the present foolishness—whatever the wickedness—placed before us, it will come as no surprise at all.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.