From “Scapegoats: The Gospel Through the Eyes of Victims” by Jennifer Garcia Bashaw
Many scholars in a variety of academic fields have written about the practice of scapegoating in the human experience, but few have made a more significant contribution to the concept of the scapegoat than Rene Girard. Girard’s theory of sacred violence, developed over the course of several decades, has captured the imaginations of philosophers, sociologists, and scholars in biblical and religious studies. The intriguing bottom-line conclusion of Girard’s research is that Christianity should be the cure for human violence and scapegoating. While humanity tends to succumb to a cycle of sacred violence, in which we create and destroy scapegoats to keep societal peace, the Christian Bible – the Gospels in particular – presents Jesus as the conclusion to the cycle of violence, the innocent victim who reveals the violent nature of humanity.
Girard’s theory begins with a simple observation: imitation is the foundation of human behavior. Philosophers and scientists alike, from Plato and Heraclitus to Freud and Foucault, have recognized the reality of imitation, or mimesis, in human behavior. Girard’s unique contribution to mimetic theory is his emphasis on human desire as mimetic, that humans not only imitate other people’s behaviors – they imitate the desires of others. And mimetic desire leads to all sorts of human conflict.
Girard theorizes that mimetic desire not only fuels human cultural interaction but also drives society to widespread violence. Girard investigates ancient cultures and their myths – humanity’s earliest literature – to support his view that the problem of mimetic desire is present from the beginning of civilization. What Girard finds in his study of ethnology confirms his suspicion: imitation has always led to conflict. He sees this in contemporary settings (children playing in a room full of toys who all gravitate toward one toy because one child first desires it), and he unearths it in early tribal cultures from every continent (men fighting over the same women, food, weapons, and land). When two people desire the same person or object, there is conflict, and violence inevitably arises. Girard labels this desire as conflictual or “acquisitive” mimesis and concludes that the violence that results from mimetic rivalry produces reciprocal violence in response and soon causes a cycle of violence that infects everyone in a community.
As humans discovered that rampant conflict among the members of a society cannot persist, they formed structures to control violence – namely, civilization and religion. Girard’s theory, then, not only attempts to explain basic human conflict, it also posits a reason why humans formed culture and religion in the first place. Religion was a preventative measure. It curbed mimetic rivalry and the resulting violence through ritual sacrifice, prohibition (law), and myth (sacred texts). Throughout human history, these three pillars of ancient religion have worked together to prevent the “mimetic crisis,” the name Girard gives to anarchical violence and conflict in societies.
Societies today keep relative peace and order with complex systems of law, government, and judiciary courts. Most early cultures did not utilize such elaborate systems; they thwarted societal conflict with their own preventive measures – tightly controlled rituals. Ritual sacrifices fight widespread violence the same way inoculation battles disease: with “littles doses of violence meant to prevent a violent crisis.” In many ancient religious rituals, the violence of a society converges on a single victim. That person or object carries the blame for societal conflict on its shoulders as a way of diverting violence away from the group. The surrogate victim, or scapegoat, serves as a substitute for the community’s violence; it unifies the community by focusing it on one destructive task and establishes peace by taking away the violence that would divide the community. Girard calls the ritual practice against a surrogate victim the “scapegoat mechanism,” and he uses myths and other literature to reveal this mechanism’s widespread presence in many societies throughout history.