Sex and Scapegoats
September 3, 2007
Those of us who believe in karma, in its Eastern or Western forms (“As ye sow, so shall ye reap”), must have seen more than hypocrisy in the recent airing of Senator Craig’s performance during the impeachment process against then-President Clinton. The Senator’s self-righteous call for the Democratic President’s removal from office for his “immorality” has come washing back to ruin his career.
Call it hypocrisy or karma, or both, there is an even more important issue underlying both these undignified episodes. How can a people who permit their country to cause the death by sanctions of hundreds of thousands of innocent children in Iraq, and then carry out the near-obliteration of their country for falsified reasons get exercised about the “morality” of a private incident, however unbefiting, that a mature society would not even drag into public notice? What is going on here?
What is going on is actually a fairly common, and very dangerous process, that manifests itself with greater or lesser intensity in virtually all societies (even some pre-human ones): scapegoating. This social reflex has not gotten nearly the attention it deserves; it is almost as though we don’t want to know about it because we hate it but feel we can’t do without it. It was the literary scholar René Girard who did an excellent job of exposing it to view in books like Violence and the Sacred (1972) and the handier and more recent Job: the Victim of his People (1986). Briefly put, Girard explains, societies have a nasty dynamic encoded in their culture which allows them to vent destructive tensions through “unanimous violence:” agreeing to blame a (usually innocent) party and join together in expelling that party from the community by one means or another, including death. The near-extermination of European Jewry during the Holocaust (ironically the word ‘scapegoat’ derives from an ancient Jewish ritual practice) is only the most horrific and obvious example in modern times. In a sense, virtually all violence contains an element of scapegoating for tensions within the self, but we can leave that for another discussion.
Now, ‘immorality’ is a conveniently vacuous term today. In the 1970s Redbook carried out a survey asking its readers to rank twenty major ‘sins.’ War was seventeenth on the list, far behind egregious behavior like wearing lipstick to church. So ‘morality’ has become vague as to content and yet still inflammatory in impact — and that makes it a perfect tool for scapegoating someone. Scapegoating depends on a charge that can be flung at anyone and against which, once it hits you, there is no defense.
Scapegoating processes lie dormant in most cultures, ready to emerge when tensions rise. There have been waves of scapegoating in the history of the United States — Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, vividly depicts one that swept through Colonial New England, while the McCarthy era is one that some of us, including the present author, experienced first hand. As these two examples show, the absurdity of the scapegoat charge only becomes clear after the spasm of unanimous violence has passed. A kind of dense ignorance protects the dynamic from exposure while it is going on, and given the inability of groups to learn from history, the denial is rarely dispelled until it’s too late. When politicians and others call some of the most egregious accusatory behavior of the Right ‘McCarthyism’ today, it is in a more or less conscious attempt to wake us up to what is happening to the country once again. And that is why the charge unfortunately doesn’t always help.
What might help is to understand what is causing the underlying tension in the first place. People are quick to accuse others when they themselves feel that they are doing something wrong. This is useful for us to bear in mind, for we progressives so despair of the raucous band that is leading our country, as Chalmers Johnson points out, away from democracy and backwards to empire, we are so baffled by their lack of reason, that we sometimes forget to credit them with sensitivity, with feelings similar to our own. And so there are two lessons we can draw from the scandal that has taken down Senator Craig. One is, not to take comfort from the fact that this time it happened to a war-supporter from the ‘wrong’ side of the aisle: the real loser here is reason, and therefore all of us. The second is, let us be always looking for ways to help our opponents out of their predicaments — emotionally and politically — rather than accusing or belittling them, which will make them only more entrenched. This scapegoating will go on as long as our horrible policies go on, and we will change those policies faster by creating alternatives to them and recognizing that on some level their supporters , like us, are looking for a way out. Remember the tremendous tribute the British historian Arnold Toynbee paid to Gandhi: “He made it impossible for us to go on ruling India; but he made it possible for us to leave without rancour and without humiliation.”
That is the ideal of nonviolent effectiveness.
