Instead of letting the social fabric collapse, everyone suddenly turns their ire on one person, the victim. Maybe this person is a foreigner, or a contrarian, or just ugly. The transition from individuals to a mob reaches a crescendo. The mob, with one will, murders the victim (or maybe just exiles them).
Maybe this person is a contrarian, but Girard also argues that the scapegoat effect is greater if the person is like any other member of the public, because then this scares the participants more because “it could have been me”
IIRC Girard posits kind of a confusing multi-step process that involves something like:
people become more and more similar due to memetic desire, competition, imitation, etc. ironically, as people become more similar, they become more divided and start more fights (since they increasingly want the same things, I guess). So, tension increases and the situation threatens to break out into some kind of violent anarchy.
in order to forestall a messy civil war, people instead fixate on a scapegoat (per Ben’s quote above). everyone exaggerates the different-ness of the scapegoat and gangs up against them, which helps the community feel nice and unified again.
So the scapegoat is indeed different in some way (different religion, ethnicity, political faction, whatever). And if you ask anybody at the time, it’ll be the massive #1 culture-war issue that the scapegoated group are all heathens who butter their bread with the butter side down, while we righteous upstanding citizens butter our bread with the butter side up. But objectively, the actual difference between the two groups is very small, and indeed the scapegoat process is perhaps more effective the smaller the actual objective difference is. (One is reminded of some of Stalin’s purges, where true believers in the cause of communism were sent to the gulag for what strike us today as minor doctrinal differences. Or the long history of bitter religious schisms over nigh-incomprehensible theological disputes.)
Isn’t Girard’s claim just pretty empirically testable? AFAIK like at no point in any of human history has >50% of the human population been Christians, so we can just look at non-Christian societies and see whether this sacrificial model (as practiced by eg the Aztecs, or at Salem) looked more like the exception, or like the rule. Like what’s the historicity of his claims?
(My impression fwiw is that it’s obviously false if you ask anthropologists or Roman scholars or China scholars or Egypt scholars, but I’m not an expert here)
Historicity of the claims is extremely low IMO insofar as he’s positing some incredibly specific mechanisms that he expects to find in societies all over the world… The idea that scapegoating often focuses on a *single person* rather than a group seems very dubious. Ditto the idea that lots of pagan religions involve sacrificial gods, or that victims are often elevated as gods after death. And Girard’s theory would seem to imply that we could easily map out repeating cycles of the scapegoat process in the history of almost every human society, which as far as I know nobody has ever even claimed to have done.
I think a salvageable position here would be to say that the specific sacrificial-god scapegoat process and all the stuff about mimetic desire, is really just an exaggerated dramatization of a more abstract process akin to “Turchin Cycles” whereby societal trust/cohesion rises and falls in a cyclical way due to game-theory-style dynamics about when it’s valuable to cooperate vs defect.
Girard is also committed to thinking that Christianity is incredibly unique (because he thinks it is literally the true religion, etc), wheras IMO Christianity has neither a monopoly on sophisticated moral reasoning about collective violence (the Bhagavad Gita and various chinese schools of thought like Confucianism and Mohism and Mahayana Buddhism come to mind), nor a particularly spotless record for avoiding scapegoating / persecution (protestant-vs-catholic wars, antisemitism, literal witch hunts, etc). So christian societies don’t seem radically different to me than non-christian ones.
I think maybe a salvageable position here for a Girard apologist would be to say something like “Okay, christian *societies* are barely detectably different from non-christian ones because they failed to live up to their values. But (as this SSC article speculates: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/30/the-invention-of-moral-narrative/ ) maybe the reason christianity got so popular and successful was because it helped illuminate the important moral truth (and/or compellingly viral outrage-bait narrative) that scapegoating sometimes happens, victims are sometimes innocent, etc.”
Maybe this person is a contrarian, but Girard also argues that the scapegoat effect is greater if the person is like any other member of the public, because then this scares the participants more because “it could have been me”
IIRC Girard posits kind of a confusing multi-step process that involves something like:
people become more and more similar due to memetic desire, competition, imitation, etc. ironically, as people become more similar, they become more divided and start more fights (since they increasingly want the same things, I guess). So, tension increases and the situation threatens to break out into some kind of violent anarchy.
in order to forestall a messy civil war, people instead fixate on a scapegoat (per Ben’s quote above). everyone exaggerates the different-ness of the scapegoat and gangs up against them, which helps the community feel nice and unified again.
So the scapegoat is indeed different in some way (different religion, ethnicity, political faction, whatever). And if you ask anybody at the time, it’ll be the massive #1 culture-war issue that the scapegoated group are all heathens who butter their bread with the butter side down, while we righteous upstanding citizens butter our bread with the butter side up. But objectively, the actual difference between the two groups is very small, and indeed the scapegoat process is perhaps more effective the smaller the actual objective difference is. (One is reminded of some of Stalin’s purges, where true believers in the cause of communism were sent to the gulag for what strike us today as minor doctrinal differences. Or the long history of bitter religious schisms over nigh-incomprehensible theological disputes.)
Isn’t Girard’s claim just pretty empirically testable? AFAIK like at no point in any of human history has >50% of the human population been Christians, so we can just look at non-Christian societies and see whether this sacrificial model (as practiced by eg the Aztecs, or at Salem) looked more like the exception, or like the rule. Like what’s the historicity of his claims?
(My impression fwiw is that it’s obviously false if you ask anthropologists or Roman scholars or China scholars or Egypt scholars, but I’m not an expert here)
Historicity of the claims is extremely low IMO insofar as he’s positing some incredibly specific mechanisms that he expects to find in societies all over the world… The idea that scapegoating often focuses on a *single person* rather than a group seems very dubious. Ditto the idea that lots of pagan religions involve sacrificial gods, or that victims are often elevated as gods after death. And Girard’s theory would seem to imply that we could easily map out repeating cycles of the scapegoat process in the history of almost every human society, which as far as I know nobody has ever even claimed to have done.
I think a salvageable position here would be to say that the specific sacrificial-god scapegoat process and all the stuff about mimetic desire, is really just an exaggerated dramatization of a more abstract process akin to “Turchin Cycles” whereby societal trust/cohesion rises and falls in a cyclical way due to game-theory-style dynamics about when it’s valuable to cooperate vs defect.
Girard is also committed to thinking that Christianity is incredibly unique (because he thinks it is literally the true religion, etc), wheras IMO Christianity has neither a monopoly on sophisticated moral reasoning about collective violence (the Bhagavad Gita and various chinese schools of thought like Confucianism and Mohism and Mahayana Buddhism come to mind), nor a particularly spotless record for avoiding scapegoating / persecution (protestant-vs-catholic wars, antisemitism, literal witch hunts, etc). So christian societies don’t seem radically different to me than non-christian ones.
I think maybe a salvageable position here for a Girard apologist would be to say something like “Okay, christian *societies* are barely detectably different from non-christian ones because they failed to live up to their values. But (as this SSC article speculates: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/30/the-invention-of-moral-narrative/ ) maybe the reason christianity got so popular and successful was because it helped illuminate the important moral truth (and/or compellingly viral outrage-bait narrative) that scapegoating sometimes happens, victims are sometimes innocent, etc.”
Banger article otherwise tho